Recent Blog Posts
Connotation interviews Sean Thomas Dougherty
In a fascinating new interview with John Hoppenthaler of Connotation Press, BOA poet Sean Thomas Dougherty discusses everything from writing habits to early work, from Frank O'Hara to Bob Dylans's Nobel Prize.Here are some of the highlights:About his writing habits, Dougherty says, "I learned a long time ago to write down on scraps of paper lines as they come to me through the dailyness. At the end of the day I might have five or six slips of papers, hastily written I-did-that-or-this-notes, noticings, and a random metaphor, a witnessing of some interaction I saw at the bus-stop or on the...
LJ puts PRIMITIVE on list of 'Top Fall Poetry'
In one of its recent issues, Library Journal included Janice N. Harrington's Primitive on its list of "Top Fall Poetry: Great Reading Beyond the Basics from Veterans and Newcomers Alike."According to the LJ review: "Early in her finely wrought new collection, a biographical and aesthetic study of African American painter Horace H. Pippin (1888-1946), Poulin and Kate Tufts honoree Harrington muses, “A Negro ‘primitive’ paints a self-portrait. But how? / What new freedom allows him to see, allows the art?” She proceeds to answer that question in forthright, muscular verse that ranges through Pippin’s life, from his World War I...
SCOUT calls THE BLACK MARIA a 'remarkable force'
In a new review of Aracelis Girmay's the black maria, SCOUT says that Girmay's writing is "driven by a conceptual confidence that allows the entire book to function as a long, piecemeal 'elelegy.'"The review offers analyses of both sections in the book. "The first section, titled 'elelegy'—at once part of 'the English elegiac tradition and the ulalatory traditions of grieving and joy in cultures of North and East Africa'—is a suite of poems stricken with mourning for the 20,000 people that 'have died at sea making the journey from North Africa to Europe in the past two decades.' These poems...
Motionpoems adapts Geffrey Davis poem into film
Motionpoems's Season 7 premiered in Minneapolis, MN, on October 27, 2016. Each short film for the new season was adapted from work by a Cave Canem poet, and one of them featured "From 35,000 Feet/Praise Aviophobia," a poem from Geffrey Davis's Revising the Storm (2014). Directed by Chad Howitt, the film is available online (and below): "After animator/producer Angella Kassube first animated one of Todd Boss's poems in 2008, the duo started introducing other poets to other video artists -- and a new hybrid form was born! Motionpoems is a 501c3 nonprofit arts organization based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We partner...
PW names THE BLACK MARIA a 'Best Book of 2016'
Publishers Weekly recently named Aracelis Girmay's the black maria as one of five "Best Books of 2016" for poetry!In its starred review of the collection, PW says, "Girmay traverses the liminal zones between personal history and sociopolitics as she lyrically explores displacement, grief, systemic racism, and more in these gorgeous, heartbreaking, and incisive poems. The book comprises two distinct poem cycles in which the legacies of colonialism are ever-present and language the oceanic medium through which we are simultaneously separated and connected."Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African...