BOA Blog

      Publishers Weekly recently included Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria and Derrick Austin’s Trouble the Water in its Spring 2016 Announcements, placing The Black Maria in the #1 spot on its Poetry Top 10 list!Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, The Black Maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness....

        Junot Díaz recently called Aracelis Girmay’s “Kingdom Animalia” his favorite poem in a New York Times Sunday Book Review feature. The list, entitled "What's Your Favorite Poem?," features a number of highly-acclaimed authors and public personas discussing their favorite poems, including broadcast journalist Katie Couric, actor Alan Cumming, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz, novelist Stephen King, young adult author John Green, children’s author Mo Willems, actress Mary-Louise Parker, and This American Life host Ira Glass.Díaz says: "Girmay is one of my favorite poets. She blows across the islands of my soul like storm season. I remember rereading these...

Geffrey Davis' poem "What I Mean When I Say Chinook Salmon," from Revising the Storm, was selected by Natasha Trethewey as this week's Featured Poem for The New York Times Magazine!According to Natasha Trethewey, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, "The poet Robert Hass wrote, 'A word is elegy to what it signifies,' a reminder that the language of a poem can be an act of memorialization. Here, the words that name an ordinary thing contain a world of experience for the speaker, evoking not only a sense of loss but also of longing."What I Mean When I Say Chinook SalmonBy...

        The San Francisco Chronicle and the Paris Review have each released "Best of 2015" lists, both featuring BOA collections!The San Francisco Chronicle chose only five poetry collections for its list, among them Nickole Brown's Fanny Says. "Brown's interest in Kentucky speech sounds, and the many speeds in her free verse--from rapid fire to syrupy-slow--fit the unfolding of her grandmother Fanny's life."The Paris Review asked contributors to pick their top books of 2015. Writer Chris Bachelder selected Robin McLean's short story collection, Reptile House.He writes: "There is no shortage of mayhem and menace in these stories, but they achieve a thrilling...

For the "Contributor’s Marginalia" section of 32 Poems, poet Zeina Hashem Beck offers her reading of Ricky Bursky's poem "This is Yours" from I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance.Praising Bursky's verse, Beck claims that this poem "immediately flirts with and involves you, the reader. And what is it, you find yourself asking, that the poem’s speaker is about to offer you? The truth, and lies, and it doesn’t matter which."The review continues: "Now I don’t know about you, but a love poem that starts with blurring the lines between reality and illusion has already won me over...The beauty of this poem partly...