BOA Blog

At the beginning of Mike Walker's review of The Hands of Strangers by Janice  Harrington, a Boa Editions publication, Walker  acknowledges the difficulty an artist might encounter his attempts to render the voices of a marginalized people clearly, without suffering arrivals at heavy-handedness and cliche. Walker writes, "If you are going to entitle a poem 'Old Photos' in a book dedicated to life in the nursing home, you'd better be a true master with words and also be able to conjure a tale alive in very fast time," a challenge to which "Harrington rises...time and time again." An exploration of...

Forget the OSCARS; the 2011 National Book Critics Award is the prize worth watching out for, especially since Aracelis Girmay's sophomore collection of poems Kingdom Animalia, published by BOA Editions, has been nominated in the category for poetry.  The award "honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature." The National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, which is elected annually,  nominates five authors for each category including autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Past winners in the category of poetry include CD Wright, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Louise Glück. This year's winners will...

This week at the Rumpus, poetry editor Brian Spears speaks with Barbara Jane Reyes on oral poetry, creation myths, Avatar, and getting paid. Particularly interesting points include discussion on balancing the perpetuation of formal boundaries in poetry with the integrity of traditional Filipino culture, as well as the fetishization of native cultures in art and literature. If you have yet to read Reyes' newest book of poems Diwata, published by BOA Editions in 2010, this interview will surely have you visiting the BOA bookstore to order your own copy. Additionally,  you can find further insights embedded within the interview from...

Mere weeks into the new year, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, set to be released by BOA this September, is already being called a 2012 must-read by reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher from NPR Books. In a composite review of 8 highly recommended poetry collections for 2012, Teicher puts Clifton’s at the top of the list. He praises her work by suggesting to readers that - should they only read one poetry book in 2012 - Clifton’s new collection “ought to be it.” As excitement builds for the release of this monumental book, which contains all of Clifton’s published (and a...

Poet Nikola Madzirov, whose collection Remnants of Another Age was published by Boa Editions March 2011, has been showcased in the Oxford Brookes Poetry Center's Poem of the Week service, selecting his poem "The One Who Writes." In case you haven't subscribed to the Poem of the Week newsletter, which you can easily do by clicking here, each week, the Poetry Centre sends out works "from new poets and established names, from sections of sequences to works in translation," to your inbox, helping to foster connections between poets, academics, and poetry readers. You can read "The One Who Writes," and...