Archive for October, 2009

A solid review of AWAYWARD by Jennifer Kronovet. This review was written by Jake Marmer and appear on Forward magazine’s website: http://www.forward.com/articles/117928/

Reading Jennifer Kronovet’s recent collection “Awayward,” you may think she’s translating from another language, transposing foreign syntactical structures, turns of phrase, rhythms, tonalities — a whole unfamiliar psyche — into English.

Kronovet’s speculative original is forever inaccessible, and can only be known through her translation. “Known”, though, would be to overestimate its accessibility because, while at all times confident and articulate, her poetry remains exotically alien and outside of the normal conventions of meaning.

Best American Poetry guest blogger Craig Morgan Teicher gives a nod to BOA’s entry into the Kindle market in his Oct. 25th entry. As he says in the entry, Craig has a book of Fables & Stories forthcoming from BOA (solid disclosure, Craig!), but he’s also a keen observer of the poetry & the publishing world thanks to his vantage point as poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and general freelance reviewer and writer. He’s excited about BOA’s move into Kindle. We are too. The more ways we can get our books into readers’ minds & hands, the better!

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Poetry E-Books and Louis Armstrong [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Hello all. First let me say it’s an honor to be here before you, doing my part to add to the text-horde, helping to create a diversion so someone else can commit the real crime. Or perhaps to fight the real crime. Anyway, I’m pleased to be here, blogging for the next week.

I promised David Lehman I’d write about jazz, and I will, a bit later. But I thought I’d begin with some thoughts on a bit of po-biz news that intersects with another part of my professional life. I make a part of my living as a technology reporter for Publishers Weekly, for whom I’ve written many stories about the burgeoning E-book business over the past couple of years. It’s recently come to my attention that the poetry and short fiction publisher BOA Editions, Ltd., has just made three of its book available for the Amazon Kindle e-reader device, which seems to be to be a good opportunity to think about the potential for e-books and the poetry scene.

This is a brilliant review of BOA’s newest fiction title, On the Winding Stair by Joanna Howard. It appears on BOMB magazine’s online blog, Bombsite.

Joanna Howard’s ON THE WINDING STAIR

By Anne Yoder

Courtesy BOA Editions.

Joanna Howard’s dizzying tales of drowned sailors, glowing specters, reclusive dandies, and roguish pursuers start like the strike of a match: they ignite in an instant to a dazzling flame and then just as suddenly die out. Howard’s linguistic prowess sets the conflagration by bombarding the reader with irresistible images, such as “a mendicant: a scarved pale beauty with silver bell earrings, curled to sleep on kinked metal filings on the floor of a windowless farm shed gone to rot.” Howard’s oft idyllic scenes depict romantic pastures, crumbling farmhouses, and other filigree among the ruins, that evoke a heightened past. And the present is always overripe. To these scenes she adds adventure, tales of restless, wandering souls, often beauties, who are chased and who pursue and who are seeking. Tie in touches of the fantastical, the macabre, and the romantic, and the intrigue that inevitably laces Howard’s stories begins to take form.

If you’re here, there’s a good chance you already know that BOA Editions is one of America’s longest-running, most distinguished literary publishers. But that’s just the bold print headline. The truth is that BOA is a bustling center of artistic activity. We’re not talking about history, we’re talking about Today. Now. With 10 books published per year and 33 years worth of active authors out in the world, giving readings, getting reviewed, being interviewed, and spreading their art under the auspices of BOA Editions… we’ve got a lot to crow about. And this is the place we’re going to do it. We intend to share up-to-the-minute information about all the great activity swirling around BOA books and our authors. We also plan on asking our authors to serve as guest-bloggers along the way. So set your bookmarks and prepare to take a brand new look at good ol’ BOA Editions!