Archive for July, 2010

Keetje Kuipers on TV 

Click on the above link to see Keetje Kuipers on TV!

In an interview with the University of Oregon, her alma mater, Keetje Kuipers discusses her past and present experiences with poetry. In particular, she reflects on past efforts to alter her technique and style that lead to the development of the poet she has become today. Kuipers also talks of future aspirations for the direction of her poetry and reads two poems from Beautiful in the Mouth, her recently published collection, and winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize.

Craig Morgan Teicher’s Cradle Book is in the running for the Story Prize. The Story Prize is a distinguished annual award given to a short story collection. We hope Craig’s book wins. He deserves it. While they’re making their decision, the Story Prize people are running brief interviews with authors whose collections have been submitted. Craig’s interview just came out and shines a little more light on his singular take on stories, fables, poems, and where Cradle Book lingers in the lands between…

What is your writing process like?
I write often. If I didn’t, I think I’d be pretty hard to deal with. Most of the “creative” writing I do (I work as a kind of journalist) is poetry; Cradle Book was a project I got obsessed with for about a year. I love fiction, but started writing poems as a teenager because I realized quickly that I didn’t have the attention span or patience to write fiction. The fables in Cradle Book are the closest I think I can get to fiction–they’ve got characters and little plots, but they also work a lot like poems, turning on phrases. Plus, they’re short–the longest one is about 7 pages, which took a lot out of me! So, to write the pieces in Cradle Book, I sat down with a sketchbook–my favorite thing to start writing in–and tried to get from beginning to end of the fable in one sitting. Then there was lots of revising…

Read the whole interview here [Craig Morgan Teicher's Short Attention Span]

The Kenyon Review acknowledges Jennifer Kronovet’s Awayward this July. Zach Savich tenderly examines Kronovet’s use of language:

“A mirror can make a small room feel larger: the tightly framed poems in Jennifer Kronovet’s first collection Awayward, often expand through linguistic mirrorings; their terms evolve through repetition. Excitingly, such repetitions don;t just pile up reflections, like in a house of mirrors, but consider the person looking into them, The viewer comes to see herself, which creates intamacy and also distance, much as one walking, when seen, becomes “that person walking” (The Country from A distance”).

Read the rest of the review here:

http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro_full.php?file=savich-kronovet.php

Yes, we’re all excited about Roger Waters’ upcoming “The Wall” tour… but this isn’t about that (unless you want to give us free tickets, in which case… we’ll talk).

No, this is even better.

Sort of.

Introducing the BOA production wall!

 

You can keep your flat screens, your LCDs, your interconnected gigabyte networked interoffice communication satellite linkups… Give us a white wall, some dry-erase paint, a handful of colorful markers, and watch us go! Suddenly the little BOA office is synched up and running into the 2010-2012 production seasons. With this wall, we can monitor a book as it goes through the process (usually around 2 years) from offering the author a contract to mailing out final review copies, hitting key deadlines and leaping design issues in a single bound.  Roger Waters may sing “Tear down the wall” but we beg to differ!

The Brooklyn Rail considers the work of one of its Brooklyn citizens, Craig Morgan Teicher, in this review of Craig’s new collection, Cradle Book: 

“Cradle Book is described as a series of fairytales.  But Craig Morgan Teicher’s second collection of poems is more precisely described as a series of aphorisms and parables—paeans, all, to our soul-stealing world.   With grim aplomb, Teicher sets about his task, constructing single-page tales that seemingly pre-date contemporary notions of narrative.”

Read the rest of the review here [Brooklyn Rail review of Cradle Book]

We are thrilled to announce that Aracelis Girmay has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, Kingdom Animalia. Her book will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2011. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited and there is no formal submission process for this award.

Poet, actress, and associate editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. She championed the work of young and gifted poets, helping many of them find publication. This award carries an honorarium of $1000 and is sponsored by the Gardner Charitable Trust. Poets Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Michael Blumenthal (both former recipients of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) assisted in judging the award with the final selection being made by BOA Editions.  

Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, fiction, and essays. Her poetry collection, Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), was awarded the GLCA New Writers Award. A Cave Canem Fellow, she has received grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Watson Foundation. Girmay teaches community writing workshops in her native California and in New York City. She is on the faculty of both Drew University’s low-residency Poetry MFA program and Hampshire College’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts. Girmay grew up in Santa Ana, CA and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Cecilia Woloch’s collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succumbs to loss, where “fat bees [fall] into the wine” and the ghost swans have “wings of death.”  The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I’ve seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up to be more peculiar in a way that’s all-together successful. Here’s an exempt from the ending of my favorite, “Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea”:

Hurry, I thought, and my hands were like birds. They could hold nothing. A feathery breeze. Then a white tree blossomed over the bed, all white blossoms, a painted tree. “Oh,” I said, or my love said to me. We want to be human, always, again, so we knelt like children at prayer while our lost mothers hushed us. A halo of bees. I was dreaming as hard as I could dream. It was fast—how the apples fattened and fell. The country that rose up to meet me was steep as a mirror; the gold hook gleamed.

[Read the rest of the review in Devils Lake]

In April 2007, BOA started publishing literary fiction through our American Reader Series. Our goal was to seek out and publish fiction that it is as singular and powerful as our poetry. Fiction written by authors more concerned with the artfulness of their writing than the twists and turns of plot . Fiction that is not only compelling to read, but also artistically excellent.

Although we didn’t consciously decide to focus on authors who hadn’t previously published story collections, it makes sense that they are the lifeblood of the series. While we have no data to support this hypothesis, it seems that there are now more places to publish poetry than non-mainstream fiction. As a publisher dedicated to publishing the best contemporary literature, we believed it was time for BOA to recognize and respond to the need to support dynamic fiction writers who are taking chances with language, style, and narrative. Of the 8 books we have published and have forthcoming, 7 of them are by first-time fiction authors:

 [I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These] by Anthony Tognazzini

[Unlucky Lucky Days] by Daniel Grandbois

[Glass Grapes and Other Stories] by Martha Ronk

[Meat Eaters and Plant Eaters] by Jessica Treat (not a first book…just a great one)

[On the Winding Stair] by Joanna Howard

[Cradle Book: Stories & Fables] by Craig Morgan Teicher

[In the Time of the Girls] by Anne Germanacos (forthcoming Oct. 2010)

This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber (forthcoming spring 2011)

We hope you’ll check out BOA’s growing backlist of innovative first books of fiction. Our next fiction title (now available for pre-order) is [In the Time of the Girls] by Anne Germanacos - another first-time author. Here are a few bits and pieces to give you a sense of this amazing debut. Interestingly enough, these “teasers” parallel the style of the stories themselves.  

About In the Time of the Girls:

These stories navigate turbulent waters from American shores, Aegean islands, and both sides of the Bosphorus. There’s a new version of the Adam and Eve story as well as a contemporary take on Ovid’s songs.

A woman with a birthmark in the shape of a map has a penchant for risky travel.

A contemporary Oedipus, living with his mother in a house full of cats, is cured of his blindness.

A treatise on monsters. A Bulgarian migrant cleaning woman whose gold teeth turn silver.

Odysseus and Penelope contemplate the Trojan War of a long marriage from both sides of the Golden Horn.

A herd of goats gnaw on notepads stolen from a NYC hotel.

An argument with caffeine.

Obnoxious peacocks, a camera that records a sheep slaughter.

A man called Adam paints scenes on his Eva’s back.

Tourists stuff their bags with fiery food in an attempt to imbibe the land.

Lost empires are contemplated and mourned, a young woman starves herself while trying to follow her father toward sainthood.

Lightning strikes, minds are lost to disease, new languages are invented.

An anthropologist communicates with an icon of the Virgin Mary. Perfect, stillborn lambs are buried beneath an olive tree.

A girl named Hera buys junk food, another named Artemis drinks soy milk; both eat ice cream called “Nirvana.”

Happy Fourth of July from your friends at BOA Editions!

Library Journal, the publication of record for librarians across the country, says this of Cradle Book by Craig Morgan Teicher. What say you?

Perhaps it’s because morals sound archaic to the modern ear that anything that ends in one strikes us as less a story than an artifact. With this varied collection of short prose pieces, Teicher (Brenda Is in the Room & Other Poems) works at some remove from the traditional fable while forfeiting none of the surprise and humor that are part of the genre. While Teicher cops many of the stylistic conventions of the fable, such as natural settings and anthropomorphized animals, the morals that close his tales are sometimes ambiguous and serve provocatively to undermine the authority of the narrator. Yet despite being set outside of time, these pieces have an anachronistic feel to them, like Elizabethan diction or peanut brittle. What’s more, the use of the moral frequently interrupts the cadence of the story, putting on the brakes almost as soon as the story’s begun. VERDICT Authored with a fine ear and subtle intellect, Teicher’s stories bridge the sometimes considerable divide between simplicity and sophistication and will appeal to those who prefer living traditions to museum pieces.