BOA Blog

Reviewer Madeleine Kruhley offers high praise for The Secret of Hoa Sen, written by Nguyen Phan Que Mai and translated by the author and Bruce Weigl, in a recent review by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kruhley endorses Mai's ability to maintain a sense of confidence among the shadow of situation: "While there are dark, gritty elements at play, Que Mai’s work does not lose itself to despair. She crafts subtleties in sentiment without being overly sentimental." This collection of poems is riddled with honest moments, illustrating the intimacy associated with cultural elements of Vietnam, whose "secrets are intrinsic to...

BOA Editions' recent release Why God Is a Woman, by Nin Andrews, is receiving high praise in a recent review from Fourth & Sycamore. "Rather than floating the idea down the central current of gender reversal, she forays into side channels, exploring ideas of religion and spirituality, love in the context of power imbalance, puberty and sexual innocence, colonialism, celebrity, empathy. Just when you feel the book has settled into a pattern or rhythm, a strange anomaly confronts you on the next page, a poem that does not carry the flag of the book’s theme but runs in a different...

In a recent NewPages review, Benjamin Champagne dives head first into Nickole Brown's Fanny Says, finding laughs, darkness, and depth that only poignant family memories can provide. "[Fanny Says] is a dense work of poems," says the review, "functioning as a memoir and a history lesson by way of the comedian. Brown is always tender but does not shy from exposing faults and social problems. Her ability to record and recreate the things her grandmother said is a prowess far beyond her. The reader is so immersed in Fanny it is as if we know her. Getting to know Fanny...

Nickole Brown's Fanny Says was recently reviewed by Lambda Literary, as a recent collection that expresses "documentary impulses in contemporary poetry." "Fanny Says delights and dazzles at every turn," says reviewer Julie R. Enszer. "In these poems, Brown finds the space and time to explore her own family and the South as an imagined location. In the tradition of great lesbian writers such as Dorothy Allison, Fannie Flagg, June Arnold and Rita Mae Brown, Nickole Brown spins a yarn that is at once fantastical and believable, one that leaves us, as readers, yearning for more. . . . In these poems, she...

Two fantastic interviews with Robin McLean have surfaced recently, carrying provocative, fascinating discussions on her new fiction collection Reptile House. Likened to Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis for stories that are "satirical, ironic, and hilarious" with a "sarcastic subtext of who we are and how we are choosing to live," McLean discusses some of the book's surprises with the Nashville Review. "Look, we walk around, most of us, me included, and I think we’re each 'normal' and also 'weirdoes,'" she says. "We love stories and murder-ridden TV shows. We are bullied by bosses at the office, then turn...