Archive for December, 2010

At the end of each year, the New York Times Magazine does a tribute to important cultural figures that passed away. The feature is called “The Lives They Lived.” This year they included a beautiful tribute to Lucille Clifton, including rare insights from one of her daughters:

“I’ve got some fox poems going around in my head,” Alexia remembered her mother saying, much as she had long ago, with her six young children playing around her, when she was inspired by something seen or contemplated and sat down at the typewriter at the dining table — or took the pen she always kept in her short Afro to jot a phrase. In the series of poems that now emerged, the fox in her yard, evening after evening, became a kind of sister, a knowing witness to Clifton’s nights alone: “only the solitary fox/watching my window light/barks her compassion. . . ./i move away from her eyes./from the pitying brush/of her tail . . ./i will keep the door unlocked/until something human comes.”

Read the entire piece here:
[NY Times Magazine Tribute to Lucille Clifton]

Lucille Clifton. BOA poet.

The Poetry Foundation's Whitman-Santa image

Special occasions often draw new readers to poetry. There’s just something about the perfectly placed poem that sets off an event and turns it into something truly unforgettable. So it was a great idea for the Poetry Foundation to post a feature on Christmas poems on their website. Let’s hope they do this every year… but with BOA poems included! (-;

[Christmas Poems]

Latern Review - the journal of “Asian American Poetry Unbound” – reviews Barbara Jane Reyes’ Diwata for their December 20 blog:

“In Poeta in San Francisco, Barbara Jane Reyes’ previous book, diwata was someone “elders say” had once “walked on earth” before the “the nailed god came” (30). These are the traces and rumors from which the titular Diwata of her latest book is resurrected. Then, like slippery oral art, like slips of the tongue, creation stories about men, women, and diwata—a god or spirit in Philippine mythology—are made up and told again and again. The poems in Diwata draw also on, and retell, Judeo-Christian creation narratives, introduced and enforced in the Philippines by the Spanish colonial regime. These retellings of myths and folk tales become a modality through which ahistory is rendered into history, history itself is investigated, and variations of diwatas, their quarries, and their hunters are revealed as inhabiting multiple narrative, linguistic, and cultural sites.”

Read the whole review here [Lantern Review on Diwata]

Barbara Jane Reyes. BOA poet.

“Society needs art more than art needs society. Art has always existed in nature, no matter what society springs up around it, but it’s we who need art to make our lives whole.”

Matthew Shenoda has published two collections of poetry, Somewhere Else and Season of Lotus, Season of Bone, the latter, published by BOA in 2009. He currently holds two positions within the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts.

The interview with Caty Gordon from The Minnesota Review, touches on everything from the evidence of Egyptian influence in Shenoda’s writing to his passion for Reggae music.

Shenoda discusses the inevitable change that true art can bring into the world and the multiple  “intersections” that culture, religion, music, art, politics, etc. create in humanity. He talks about how this theme is prevalent in his work and ultimately gives some much needed advice to young, aspiring writers on any particular road.

To read the entire interview just click here:

Matthew Shenoda Interview

Let it be known that on Friday, December 3rd, FuturPointe Dance came to BOA’s holiday gala and rocked the house. See for yourself! This is a video of the dance they choreographed as an interpretation of the poem”The City in Which I Love You” by Li-Young Lee. Keep in mind, they’re performing in a small hallway outside the BOA office and basically no one watching even knew this was about to happen. Talk about a nice surprise!

The featured dancers are: N’jelle Gage, William Knighten, Melinda Phillips, Heather Roffe, and Guy Thorne.

The art projection you see in the background was done by Guy Thorne

For more about FuturPointe visit: www.futurpointedance.org

Watch the video here: [FuturPointe Dance at BOA Editions] 

FuturPointe Dance at BOA Editions

Cradle Book comes off its mention in the New Yorker as one of the “Eleven Best Poetry Books of 2010” with a lovely review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Among other things, the review points out:

“Ours is a world in which fables are uncomfortable inhabitants. Craig Morgan Teicher, the 2007 Colorado Prize-winning poet for “Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems,” knows this. He knows we are unlikely to fall for (or follow) some pithy statement about how we ought to live our lives. Instead, in “Cradle Book,” he leaves the reader, usually in some charged darkness, wondering what to do, where to go. His fables, like his poems (born of this beautiful, ambiguous and often downright confusing world), promise not answers but gorgeous articulations of the questions.”

Read the whole review here [MN Star Tribune reviews Cradle Book]

Craig Morgan Teicher. BOA Author.

Naomi Shihab Nye. BOA Poet.

We’re thrilled to announce that BOA will publish Naomi Shihab Nye’s new poetry collection, Transfer, in September 2011!

Naomi is a long-time BOA author and a bona fide American  poetry treasure. If you ever get the chance to hear her read… take it. We guarantee that her voice and presence will stay with you for many, many moons afterwards.

Here’s a little taste of what we’re talking about. The Academy of American Poets just posted a clip of Naomi reading the poem “Alive” from the Transfer collection. Enjoy!

[Naomi Shihab Nye reads "Alive"]

On Dec 6, 2010 the New Yorker published a list of the “Eleven Best Poetry Books of 2010” compiled by Dan Chiasson. We are thrilled to say that Cradle Book by Craig Morgan Teicher made the list! Chiasson calls it, “A touching book of fables and fairy tales you could read to a child, saturated with Teicher’s unusually gentle and weird imagination. I’m counting these as ‘prose poems’ mainly to get them on this list.”

It’s worth noting that BOA started our fiction series with the intention of focusing on collections that fall between the gaps of fiction and poetry. Cradle Book is a perfect example of one of those books. It was published as “fiction” however it can fairly be classified as prose poetry, fables, stories, and probably a few other things too. You can call it whatever you want, including one of the “Eleven Best Poetry Books of 2010.” We call it a singular and beautiful collection of writing.

 You can read“Eleven Best Poetry Books of 2010” here:  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/12/eleven-best-poetry-books-of-2010.html#ixzz17RgdA8KX

Craig Morgan Teicher's "Cradle Book"

Kryssa Schemmerling reviews Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s new collection, Burning of the Three Fires, in the current issue of BigCityLit. Does she like it? 

“Dolls, brides, fairytale heroines, and anorexics all make appearances, as Beaumont offers multiple views of womanhood from a variety of angles. Rather than overwhelming us with personal information, the poet dons various masks, peeking out from behind them to offer measured, tantalizing glimpses of what we imagine to be her inner state.”

Read the whole review here [BigCityLit review of Burning of the Three Fires]

Jeanne Marie Beaumont. BOA poet.