BOA Editions Blog

“we listen to the eucalyptus scratch the violet sky“

Hugh Martin reads his poem “Foot Patrol” during an on-air interview with Iowa Public Radio, as interviewer Charity Nebbe “explores art created by veterans in their post-military lives.” The initial serenity of eucalyptus in the poem is juxtaposed with the violence that Martin experienced first-hand during the Iraq war. Martin admits in the interview that his interest in poetry prior to Iraq was not piqued until he took an undergraduate creative writing class. In the recent Spring 2013 Issue of The Iowa Review, Hugh Martin is featured as the winner of the 2012 Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans, along with some of his poems.

Listen to the IPR interview here. Iowa Public Radio is part of the NPR digital network.

The Stick Soldiers is available at the BOA Bookstore.

With the 13th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize just around the corner, BOA is thrilled to announce that esteemed poet David St. John will judge this year’s contest.

David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant awards for poets, including fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both The Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized.

He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and The Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of the PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing.

David St. John is the author of ten collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently, The Auroras, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is also co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of the New Poem. He currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

An annual competition, the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize is awarded to honor a poet’s first book, while also honoring the late founder of BOA Editions. The winner for the 13th annual prize, chosen by David St. John, will receive A $1,500 Honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in spring 2015, in The A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America Series. A Foreword for the winning book will also be written by David St. John.

There’s never been a better to time to get involved with BOA. Keep an eye out for contest updates and results on the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize submissions page, the BOA Blog, and Facebook and Twitter pages.

HTML Giant recently posted “25 points” about BOA’s new Pakistani translation Light and Heavy Things, a collection of selected poems by Zeeshan Sahil, translated from the Urdu by Christpoher Kennedy, Faisal Siddiqui, and Mi Ditmar.

The 25 points, listed almost as one’s informal stream of consciousness through reading the book, provide background on Sahil’s life, the time period in which he was writing, and the trends that his writing fits into. The points comment on particular poems, and on the poet himself.

Here are some of our favorites:

2. Zeeshan Sahil was born in Hyderabad, Sindh, in the ‘60s. He wrote within a fairly small and well-known circle of Pakistani poets who, to my mind, are the Urdu answer to Bolano’s Infrarealismo movement. A lot of prose poetry going on, a lot of experimenting with, if not ignoring, meter and rhyme entirely. A lot of art.

3. He published eight collections of poetry in Urdu (mostly free verse though) and also wrote for broadcast radio which is no small thing for someone in Pakistan in the time period.

4. Experimental poets writing for radio in a war torn area, kinda a thing.

5. This book is 56 pages and it took a team of three translators to bring it into English.

6. Sometimes he writes from the perspective of a woman, I think.

8. He makes his point in such a quiet way, in such a vulnerable, elegant, this-thin-glass-lightbulb-could-shatter-in-your-hands-at-any-minute way, that it’s disarming, astounding. Like eerily demure. Entirely manipulative and totally works for him.

9. “I’m not saying, I’m just saying,” all over these pages. All day long with the vulnerability in his manipulativeness.

10. We forgive him.

11. I think what he was really doing was expressing the way an elderly lady in Pakistan would feel genuinely, and also with really good intentions. What has happened here? Why does this happen? Etc.

14. “This heart is a bomb.”

20. I feel like he reminds me of Adrienne Rich sometimes, of all poets:

when the mail is delivered again
every day a postcard
with news that we’re alive
will reach our friends.
maybe they will come here
to search for us
where people who are always searching
are lost.

21. “will design canvas shoes
and gowns for poor women
on her computer.”

22. That last one was like, okay woah, with the whole suburban girl being like, “I want to help the world. I want to feel like I am doing good. I have a date for brunch in twenty minutes.” And he’s all: Man I just hate dumb people. Do I even want “help” from people at this point?

25. “Despite the eternal anger of God toward poets//my prayer begins with you.”

See all of HTML Giant‘s “25 Points” about Light and Heavy Things.

Pre-order Light and Heavy Things from the BOA Bookstore today, and receive your copy within a week!

In honor of Mother’s Day this weekend, we’ve selected some great books to explore for the occasion. Some of these collections are by mothers, some of mothers, and all portray the importance, influences, and challenges of the role.

You and Yours, poems by Naomi Shihab Nye (2005)

Sewing, Knitting, Crocheting
(Mother’s Day 1999)

A small striped sleeve in her lap,
navy and white,
needles carefully whipping in yarn
from two sides.
She reminds me of the wide-angled women
filled with calm
I pretended I was related to
in crowds.

In the next seat
a yellow burst of wool
grows into a hat with a tassel.
She looks young to crochet.
I’m glad history isn’t totally lost.
Her silver hook dips gracefully.

And when’s the last time you saw
anyone sew a pocket onto a gray linen shirt
in public?
Her stitches must be invisible.
A bevelled thimble glitters in the light.

On Mother’s Day
three women who aren’t together
conduct delicate operations
in adjoining seats
between La Guardia and Dallas.
Miraculously, they never speak.
Three different kinds of needles,
three snippy scissors, (in the old days,
when you could carry scissors and knives),

everybody else on the plane
snoozing with The Times.
When the flight attendant
offers free wine to celebrate,
you’d think they’d sit back,
chat a minute,
tell who they’re making it for,
trade patterns, yes?

But a grave separateness
has invaded the world.
They sip with eyes shut
and never say
Amazing
or
Look at us
or
May your thread
never break.

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (2012)

Known for her tremendous relationship with her children, including her three daughters who played an integral part in the publication of her Collected Poems, Lucille Clifton writes profoundly of her family life: her children and grandchildren, her husband, and her own mother who had such a deep and powerful influence on her life as a woman and a poet. The culmination of a 40-year career by one of America’s most revered poets, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all of Lucille Clifton’s published collections with 69 previously unpublished poems. An insightful Foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, and a comprehensive Afterword by noted poet Kevin Young, frame Clifton’s lifetime body of work, providing a definitive statement about this major American poet’s career.

Sleeping with Houdini, poems by Nin Andrews (2007)

Writing of “mother” in much of this collection, Nin Andrews starts from the premise that life on Earth is suffering, and that a large part of daily life and art is a search for an escape from this essential truth. Sleeping with Houdini is a kind of “inscape” of a girl’s life, an inside look at her fantasies and fears, her wishes and dreams, a collection in which Houdini becomes a metaphor for her longing. A mother’s presence, and the questions a young girl asks of her, is a constant in this book.

Refuge, poems by Adrie Kusserow (2013)

While Adrie Kusserow, a poet, mother, and anthropologist, probes culture and globalization with poems about Sudanese refugees based in Uganda, Sudan, and the United States, especially the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” she also struggles with how to respond to suffering, poverty, and the brutal aspects of war having brought her children into this larger global arena.

Take the opportunity to explore these outstanding works by mothers, and of mothers, this Mother’s Day.

Image courtesy of The New York Times Book Review | 5 May 2013

Beloved poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Li-Young Lee have been garnering big attention in recent media.

In last Sunday’s The New York Times Book Review, American poet and critic Robert Bly lists both Naomi Shihab Nye and Li-Young Lee as two of his “favorite poets of all time.” Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of BOA titles Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You and Yours (2005), and Transfer (2011); Li-Young Lee is the author of BOA titles Rose (1986), The City in Which I Love You (1990), Book of My Nights (2001), and the new reissue of his American Book Award-winning memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (2013).

Langston Ward, winner of the 2013 Poetry Out Loud National Competition, recited Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift,” for his final recitation, along with Kenneth Rexroth’s “The Bad Old Days,” and Walt Whitman’s “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown.” Ward, who won from a competitive field of some 375,000 students, said, “I’ll keep these poems with me forever, that much I know.” A senior at Mead High School in Spokane, Washington, he received a $20,000 award and his high school will receive a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books.

Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift” is published in his poetry collection Rose.

For Robert Bly’s entire NYT Book Review list of “favorite poets of all time,” click here.

Click here for more about Naomi Shihab Nye’s titles.

Click here for more about Li-Young Lee’s titles.

BOA poet Ryan Teitman, author of the recent Litany for the City (2012), has his poem “Archipelago” featured as a Read Selection for the new issue of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. We thought we’d share it with you. Congratulations, Ryan!

Archipelago
Ryan Teitman

A bird is a kind
of island. In flight,
a flock is called

an archipelago.
At rest, a peninsula.
When two flocks

meet, they are called
a communion.
Used in a sentence:

Two flocks
met and became
a communion.

A surgeon opens
a body with a scalpel.
A scalpel is a kind

of bird: small,
thin, flightless.
A flock of scalpels

is called a bouquet.
Children are a kind
of book. We take them

from the library
and put them back.
A flock of children

is called a collection.
A body is a body
until it falls into ruin.

Then the body
is a kind of nothing.
A nothing is a kind

of bird: rare, sweet
voiced, carnivorous.
It eats the eggs

of other birds.
It’s the island I go to
when I fall into ruin.

Click here for more about Litany for the City.

Ira Sadoff’s True Faith (BOA, 2012) is both “provocative and mature,” according to Gently Read Literature. The collection wrestles with notions of “god, country, and self,” and it is through explorations of these themes that Sadoff becomes a “skilled craftsman, imparting his vision—and his questions—in perfectly sculpted bursts of powerful language.”

True Faith openly admits to a negative, sometimes “derisive” tone, but not without purpose. In an attempt to “reach the core of the human mind and heart,” Sadoff interrogates “ideas of faith,” juxtaposes a “young man’s innocence” with a “naïve and sleeping America,” boldly exposes our “inability to communicate freely and openly,” and thoroughly depicts the “failure and fallacy of the American dream.”

“The human voice is captured beautifully as one can almost hear the fist pounding the podium—or kitchen table—at the end of each line.”

If “good art” gives us “new perspective on the world,” then Sadoff’s collection of “superbly crafted poems,” moves us into a “new outlook by questioning belief systems… [allowing] readers to explore the deeper reaches of their minds and the foundations of their beliefs.”

Click here to purchase your own copy of True Faith.

As we close the chapter on this year’s National Poetry Month, Kazim Ali shares a few words about poetry’s importance in everyday life, and reads his poem “Ocean Street” on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Likening poetry to the human body, Ali says: “The line of poetry teaches us about the length of breath, and the way energy moves through a poem teaches us about the way breath and blood move through the human body.” In other words, poetry is a way of living.

Ali is the author of The Fortieth Day (BOA, 2008), and co-translator of BOA’s forthcoming Iranian translation The Oasis of Now (fall, 2013) by Sohrab Sepehri, a bilingual English and Farsi edition. He is a contributing writer for The Writers Chronicle and founding editor of Nightboat Books.

Visit NPR’s webpage to hear Kazim Ali talk poetry and read “Ocean Street.”

Click here to purchase a copy of The Fortieth Day. 

Rain Taxi Review of Books is calling Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia “inventive,” an “important contemporary addition to poetic wrestling with the religious,” compared with the works of Augustine.

Among other praises, reviewer Spencer Dew marvels at the creative manner by which Beasley addresses the divine while simultaneously speaking to such topics and objects as Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite of the feline digestive tract, or a TiVo Customer Service telephone line. How does he do it? “[Beasley] manages to keep the reader connected by stitching such abstract and conceptual musings to the recognizable and known. Voicemail messages warning of call volume, popups containing password reset prompts, the vernacular idioms by which we express ourselves in a stuttering resistance of expression: Beasley uses these to gesture at broader philosophical concerns.”

Live person,

please.

Because some days being feels
experimental, randomized,
placebo-suspect, double-blind,

some voice inside the hissing
keeps saying to us (robotic, anachronistic): Reenter the code.

“This is a book that wrestles with religious forms as well as religious notions, considering religious practice and experience in relation to current-day concerns. This includes not only the putting of lines on paper, but also waiting for customer service or meditating on the grand design of the Toxoplasma gondii lifecycle… what sets Theophobia apart—as a thick, varied, and always thoughtful exercise—is considering such a phenomena as a religious task, revealing of something essential to our understanding of God, as Augustine argued in relation to vipers and worms… Beasley casts a broad net, dredging deep in this important contemporary addition to poetic wrestling with the religious.”

Click here to read the full review of Theophobia.

Click here to purchase Theophobia, today.

“Folks, get into Geffrey Davis,” says Muzzle magazine (online) of the most recent winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Davis was chosen for Muzzle‘s “30 Under 30″ for his poem “What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man,” from his Poulin Prize-winning manuscript Revising the Storm.

While the word “masculine” has long been associated with that which is “muscular, rigid, strong, recluse, stubborn, and fisted,” Muzzle speaks on the “softness” of masculinity, which is represented in Davis’ poetry: “Geffrey Davis’ work takes that off and splits it open, shows us the soft cotton that makes the word muscular, the tender, purple flesh it takes to make the word strong possible. Geffrey’s work tackles manhood, fatherhood, sonhood… love, and sexuality with a boxer’s hands: firm and weathered, capable of so much violence and wreckage, but purposefully gentle and fond when handling our fragile humanity.”

Calling Davis a “master of the turn,” Muzzle deems the poet an “honest voice… able to guide us patiently through the nature of work… to lead us to where we want to go, where he wants us to go.”

“I learned to cry like that, as if
I could sprain the heart, the body hurting its way out.

But that morning my mind snuck
back to the nights he took paychecks and split,

sometimes for weeks, his head and body
humming for dope, his wife and kids

suspended by the boundlessness of waiting.”

-from “What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man”

Garnering much attention for his new collection of poems, Davis also recently won the 2013 Dogwood Award for his poem “What We Set in Motion,” and Sycamore Review‘s Wabash Poetry Prize for “What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man,” selected by Nikki Finney. Dogwood poetry judge Adrian Matejka calls “What We Set in Motion” an “ambitious and rangy poem that manages to be both muscular and delicate… reminiscent of James Wright.” According to Sycamore Review, “What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man” “dares to entwine issues of family and fealty with those of faith.” Both poems are from Revising the Storm, which will be published by BOA in its Spring 2014 season.

“…Soon you will be able to carry the raw workings of Geffrey around in your pocket,” says Muzzle. “This man is a wonder of strength and delicacy, someone that we will watch for years as he muscles his way to the venerable and quiet.”

Click here to read the entire post from Muzzle.

For more on Geffrey Davis, visit www.geffreydavis.com, or the poet’s Facebook page.