BOA Blog

The Kenyon Review acknowledges Jennifer Kronovet's Awayward this July. Zach Savich tenderly examines Kronovet's use of language: "A mirror can make a small room feel larger: the tightly framed poems in Jennifer Kronovet's first collection Awayward, often expand through linguistic mirrorings; their terms evolve through repetition. Excitingly, such repetitions don;t just pile up reflections, like in a house of mirrors, but consider the person looking into them, The viewer comes to see herself, which creates intamacy and also distance, much as one walking, when seen, becomes "that person walking" (The Country from A distance"). Read the rest of the review...

Yes, we're all excited about Roger Waters' upcoming "The Wall" tour... but this isn't about that (unless you want to give us free tickets, in which case... we'll talk). No, this is even better. Sort of. Introducing the BOA production wall!   You can keep your flat screens, your LCDs, your interconnected gigabyte networked interoffice communication satellite linkups... Give us a white wall, some dry-erase paint, a handful of colorful markers, and watch us go! Suddenly the little BOA office is synched up and running into the 2010-2012 production seasons. With this wall, we can monitor a book as it goes through the process (usually around 2...

The Brooklyn Rail considers the work of one of its Brooklyn citizens, Craig Morgan Teicher, in this review of Craig's new collection, Cradle Book:  "Cradle Book is described as a series of fairytales.  But Craig Morgan Teicher’s second collection of poems is more precisely described as a series of aphorisms and parables—paeans, all, to our soul-stealing world.   With grim aplomb, Teicher sets about his task, constructing single-page tales that seemingly pre-date contemporary notions of narrative." Read the rest of the review here [Brooklyn Rail review of Cradle Book]

[caption id="attachment_960" align="alignleft" width="295" caption="Aracelis Girmay. BOA Poet. Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award. "][/caption] We are thrilled to announce that Aracelis Girmay has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, Kingdom Animalia. Her book will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2011. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited and there is no formal submission process for this award. Poet, actress, and associate editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry and was the first recipient of the...

[caption id="attachment_448" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Carpathia by Cecilia Woloch"][/caption] Cecilia Woloch's collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succumbs to loss, where "fat bees [fall] into the wine" and the ghost swans have "wings of death."  The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I've seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up...