BOA Blog

Words Without Borders recently reviewed Mangalesh Dabral's new Hindi translation This Number Does Not Exist, noting the author's "gift for sharing his inner life."Reviewer Kate Prengel writes that Dabral uses "a spare, concrete language that lends itself beautifully to translation," while also noting the themes of his poems: "so simple they verge on being impersonal: childhood, sunshine, concerns about the future. Nothing here is developed enough to give it an individual character. It is up to the reader to supply the details. This poem, like many of Dabral’s works, escapes from impersonality only when the readers dip into their own memories and enrich the poem...

West Virginia newspaper The Journal recently ran a review of Ray Gonzalez's award-winning Beautiful Wall in its Weekender section, calling the book a "profound journey into the heart of a man familiar with the gods of poetry, politics, and art."Reviewer Sonja James praises Gonzalez's ability to combine his surrealistic style with the current issues surrounding the U.S. including religion, immigration, and racism. She says: "These poems celebrate humanity in its relationship to the greater undercurrents of being in the world. . . . This is a bright and generous book proving that poetry sustains us in our quest for the...

Poetry Northwest recently reviewed G.C. Waldrep's Testament, offering an in-depth analysis of the book-length poem, and calling it "a truly major poetic achievement."Reviewer R.M. Haines praises Waldrep's ability to drive against the stereotypical idea of a testament through his inclusion of "rhetorical discontinuity, protean lexical range, relentless associative leaps, and daringly abstract aphorism." Haines describes the work as a stroke of "genius." In the book-length poem, Waldrep takes themes such as religion, race, and personal life experiences, and leaves them open-ended enough to for readers to "discover a new idiom of extraordinary freedom, dexterity, and scope" within his words. The review concludes: "Ultimately,...

 Erez Bitton's poetry collection You Who Cross my Path, translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller, has just been selected by World Literature Today as a May Nota Bene.The WLT review calls the collection "concise yet emotional," with poems that "range from discussions of love and beauty to childhood, the poet’s blindness, and his identity as an Israeli of North African descent and the first poet to employ Judeo-Arabic dialect in his work. This bilingual edition includes work from two of his books, allowing an extensive entry to his world without sight but with profound observation."This first US publication of Erez...

Aimee Parkison's book of short stories, The Innocent Party (BOA, 2012), is the inspiration for much of the new album being released by Portland, OR, punk band The Taxpayers. In a DS Exclusive premiere of the upcoming album, Big Delusion Factory, singer Rob Taxpayer talks about his inspiration from Parkison's story "Call Me Linda.""'Call Me Linda' is the oldest song on Big Delusion Factory. The opening line comes from a short story in The Innocent Party by the author Aimee Parkison, who is a fiction writer that I like. A few years back, I was having some trouble writing anything,...