BOA Blog

Don't forget to sign up for this Saturday's inaugural event of our new series Writing Exercises! The first installment of an intellectually enriching series of creative writing workshops, Writing Exercises will offer participants the opportunity to work closely with two nationally recognized authors and to learn new techniques to enhance and inspire their own poetry and fiction. We are kicking off the series with two powerhouses of poetry and prose, and seasoned writing instructors to boot:  Isabella Gardner Award-winning BOA author and Syracuse University professor Christopher Kennedy and Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way and a current...

We’re glad to see that so many people have enjoyed and re-posted BOA’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize coordinator Albert Abonado’s interview of Sean Thomas Dougherty! Here is Albert’s next installment – an interview with BOA poet Barbara Jane Reyes about her new book Diwata. Barbara’s last book, Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005) won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Diwata was published this month by BOA and has garnered such comments as, “Diwata is a book that would have raised the hairs on the nape of Emily Dickinson’s head” (Nick Carbo), and, “Reyes...

Wyn Cooper recently published his fourth book of poetry, Chaos Is the New Calm.  In the past, Cooper's work has been greeted with warm admiration; in addition to his previous books, The Country of Here Below, The Way Back, and Postcards from the Interior, his poems, stories, essays, and reviews appearing in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Slate, and more than 75 other magazines.  This newest addition seems no exception, gaining high praise from Timothy Mayo in Verse Wisconsin.  “One can read the poems in Wyn Cooper’s new book Chaos is the New Calm as declarations of independence from an...

BOA's A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize coordinator Albert Abonado recently interviewed BOA poet Sean Thomas Dougherty about his newest collection, Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line, and the state of American poetry. Anyone who knows Sean's poetry knows that he doesn't pull any punches - he throws them. Dorianne Laux calls Dougherty "a poet of grand and memorable vision" and describes Sasha as "the gypsy punk heart of American poetry." Patricia Smith believes that "this book will be the one that stamps his defiant signature on the canon." Dougherty's last book, Broken Hallelujahs, delved deep into his family history, including being...

[caption id="attachment_1048" align="alignleft" width="254" caption=""Free Radical" a portrait of Alan Michael Parker by Felicia van Bork"][/caption] "What is American about American Poetry?" That was the question posed by the Poetry Society of America upon the occasion of their centenary. BOA poet Alan Michael Parker - Love Song with Motor Vehicles (BOA, 2003) and Elephants & Butterflies (BOA, 2008) - tackled the question with his usual sense of intelligence, good humor, and linguistic acrobatics: "In my own work, the post-Romantic inheritance seems to me distinctly American; how the lyric defaults to a simplified artistic construct: experience + insight = epiphany. I spend a...