BOA Blog

WBEZ 91.5 featured a review of Adam McOmber's short story collection, This New & Poisonous Air.  The review speaks highly of McOmber's work and his ability to blend "myths, fairy tales, and fables" into beautiful and intriguing stories.  McOmber uses a varied palette of time and history to create fresh and innovative characters, events, and pictures. These "intricate and provocative stories" are at once distinct and yet unified in their "timeless" quality.  McOmber has succeeded in creating a collection that is "laced with sorrow and mystery, beauty and compassion, insight and protest."  Further, "This New & Poisonous Air is exquisitely...

[caption id="attachment_1015" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Your Father on the Train of Ghosts. Poems by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher."][/caption] John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep continue their candid and insightful discussion about the process of writing the poems for their collaborative book Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.  Written over a year, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep exchanged emails almost exclusively in the form of poems.  In this next part of the conversation, the two discuss the nature of address found in the poem, the use of the "You,"  the role of community in poetry, and the mysterious, haunting nature of...

[caption id="attachment_1015" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Your Father on the Train of Ghosts. Poems by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher."][/caption] After exchanging poems via email at a sometimes furious rate for a year, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep were left with the task of turning this abundance of poems into a more manageable manuscript.  In part three of a six part series, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep return to discuss the collaborative effort involved in shaping Your Father on the Train of Ghosts into a cohesive collection that remained true to the spirit of writing the poems. You can read earlier parts...

Two of BOA's recent stars, Nikola Madzirov and the inimitable team of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep, were recently featured in the Bloomsbury Review, a bimonthly "book magazine" devoted to sharing the best contemporary literature. "Our mission," they write, "is to seek out those quality books that are underserved and undeservedly overlooked by other media—bringing you reviews of books from large publishers that don’t receive the promotional budget of their bestsellers, and new books from small, regional, nonprofit, independent, and university presses you won’t discover elsewhere." Besides this, the Bloomsbury Review is "simply lively writing about good reading and great...

[caption id="attachment_1015" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Your Father on the Train of Ghosts. Poems by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher."][/caption] Don’t Answer the Door (or Do) In this second of six part series, poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep continue to explore their experience writing Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, the product of a year-long exchange of poems via email, discussing the interior life of the poems and the collaborative nature of their book, a collection that John Ashbery referred to as one where the pair write within "a growing region, but there are others too, regions/ and examples of...