Archive for February, 2011

In his blog A Burning Patience, Lyle Daggett writes about Barbara Jane Reyes’ newest book Diwata, a collection he calls “profoundly moving.”  Citing various poems as ”pure incantation,” Daggett reflects on Reyes’ abilty to connect mythology and reality with history and culture. 

He states, “Running through the varying times and places in the poems, and the subtly shifting voices and perspectives, I feel a consistent essential thread of storytelling, bringing knowledge to light, knowledge often obscured by the fogs of long colonization (both beyond and within the borders of the empire) but not entirely lost.”     

Read the full post here A Burning Patience

Barbara Jane Reyes. BOA poet.

In their Feb 21st issue, Publishers Weekly gives early attention to two forthcoming spring 2011 BOA poetry titles:

Ennui Prophet, poems by Christopher Kennedy (published June 2011)

“Hip and inviting, Kennedy’s short prose poems rarely fail to entertain: ‘I’ll buy you a reason to live if you promise to share,’ one says, while another visits the ‘Museum of Wrong Turns,’ finding ‘something for everyone: cowboy boots worn by former presidents,’ for example…Kennedy runs the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse: this third book of prose poems (his fourth overall) shows his clear mastery of several prose-poem forms, with lyricism, jokiness, non sequiturs, sadness, and even a bit of cultural criticism to boot.”

Ennui Prophet, poems by Christopher Kennedy

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, poems by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher (published May 2011)

  “With their estranged speakers, fluid situations, and shifting pronouns, many pages come very close to the postmodern comic techniques of John Ashbery in the 1970s, or to James Tate’s more recent books… Many of these poems rise above pastiche to shine in their own evening light.”

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, poems by G.C. Waldrep & John Gallaher

Here’s to a poetic spring (and may it come soon)!

http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2011/02/keetje-kuipers.html

Poet Joe Weil shares with readers of the Best American Poetry blog his early personal experiences with poet Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of the recently released Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line. Of Sean, he writes “I knew by his references, by his metaphors, and sound that he had read a great deal of poetry, that he had a far roaming yet accurate ear, and that these poems I was hearing out loud would deepen rather than disappear when I brought the book back with me to the mold making plant and read them at lunch break.”  Read more of what Joe Weil has to say about Sean here:

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2011/02/singing-the-laundry-tribute-to-poet-sean-thomas-dougherty-i-met-poet-sean-thomas-dougherty-back-in-1996-when-he-featured-fo.html

To celebrate this past Valentine’s Day, the editors and writers of Slate were asked to discuss their favorite love poems. Senior Editor Michael Agger selected the poem “Three Rivers” by Alpay Ulku from his book Meteorology; a poem that Michael says captured his attention from the first line.  You can read more of Michael Agger’s comments on the poem here:

 http://www.slate.com/id/2284679/pagenum/all/#p2

Cradle Book is “worth your time” according to a review by Kyle Minor from HTML Giant.  Minor writes that Craig Morgan Teicher’s newest collection comes from a childhood place that is often not explored in literature today.  His “old-made-new” form brings us back to the style we loved as children, introducing us to characters as colorful as a “crow who was not always a crow.”  

Quoting lines from various pieces, Minor explains, “The diction is low to the ground, but the tone implies that bigness will be the subject, and the subject will be reached by looking very closely at smallness.”

Read the full review here HTML Giant       

Poet Matthew Shenoda was in Egypt only a few weeks before the events in the country unfolded. Matthew frequently visits Egypt, hoping the country and its people will one day find peace. Featured below are poems from his Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone where one sees how his contemplative lyrical voice captures both the difficulties the country faced and the resilience of its people, how a country’s politics can also have a deeply-rooted spiritual dimension and that despite seemingly overwhelming circumstances, there is always hope to be found.

Countryside

Why toss a bird in the sky
& not allow her to fly?

         Cane juice flows
         & palm leaves eddy
         in the heart of a heart
         the places where songs are made from stone

Why split the fusion
& make a box for two? 

         Let the thatch roof dry
         this is the place of hasad
         where rebel communities anchor
         their fists in land

Why create clash
& call it natural?

         Let the hills roll
         & the seeds resist the cover of soil
         this is the storm that feeds
         the place of compressed, rural strength

Why breathe fire
& call it light?

         Let the hands cup rain
         & the feet wade
         these are the kamanga strings
         that bend for humanity

Why try to confound the spirit
when the spirit’s greater than you? 

          Let us be hibiscus flower
          & let the people go where they need to go
          along the road paved with cane
          & double binds

In This Place

From the air, you understand
topography is a child’s feet
dragging through sand.

The coral heads of the Red Sea
dotting a map from Africa
to the Levant.

In between, the sea and the rise of Sinai,
the Nile, and the streets of Cairo,
the air hangs heavy with trepidation,
calling for the weaver to save the sky
with cotton yarn and indigo dye.

We promise ourselves that this world would sustain us
that the spring will not dry before our children’s thirst.

We run our fingers on sandstone
speak stories in rivets and impressions.

We cup our hands for water
and pray the birds will learn to drink

The architecture of the streets we rise from
is shaped from fragility and resilience.

The peddler’s kufiyah woven with understanding
wind can kill or save in the desert.

Beneath the scarves which cover these furrows
lives colored by the farmer’s plow

We wonder why the children’s eyes have grown so large—
igniting this charcoal landscape.
 

Season of Bone

Poverty we have seen
but never this soulless gaze
of beast and human
the trees beg their maker
for drought
unable to bear the thought
of survival
in a forgotten land 

And here before the cadence of war
the screeching symphony of vile stalkers
drowned in the memory of the aggrieved
the river of his head swells and swallows
his wife and children a reverie to the rubble
lost in the crevice of the whip hand’s undertaking

He prays for ascendancy,
wanders the Red Sea shore
names each fish like a child
something to bear the loss

He cries to the youth
pulls at the flesh of his eyes

We will rise from the mist of oppression
like rejuvenated reeds on the banks of the River.

In addition to the four BOA authors, who were recipients of 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, we are thrilled to announce that translator Brian Henry was awarded an NEA fellowship to support his translation of Slovenian writer Aleš Šteger’s collection of lyric essays Berlin.  You can read more about Henry’s prestigious grant here. 

The NEA fellowship will help Henry to continue his dedication to exposing English readers to the work of one of Slovenia’s most promising young writers, an undertaking first begun with Henry’s translation of Šteger’s The Book Things, which was published just last fall by BOA Editions. 

Congratulations to Brian Henry and Aleš Šteger for their achievements!

If you have not already picked up a copy of The Book of Things, check it out in the BOA Bookstore Online.

Recently, Charles Coté spoke with Boa Editions poet Kazim Ali about his book, The Fortieth Day, his earlier publications, his methods as a poet, and his philosophies as a writer.

The interview is detailed and intensely thoughtful, focusing in on specific lines, images, techniques, and motifs that Kazim Ali uses in his poetry. Fans of Ali’s work will certainly learn a great deal about his poetry and process from this thought-provoking interview.

The following is a short excerpt from the interview:

Coté: Another line in your collection, in the poem “The Far Mosque”, the last line – “a person is only a metaphor for the place he wants to go” – came as a great surprise. What can you say about the place you wanted to go in this collection, or the place you found yourself going?

Ali: Let me say first off that the poem “The Far Mosque” was a reflection back on my book The Far Mosque. I didn’t want a poem with that title in the first book. There’s no poem called “The Fortieth Day” in my new book but I want to write that poem.

I think The Fortieth Day was my effort to understand the place that I want to go as where I actually am. So here I am, on the fortieth day. There’s a line something like this: “On the fortieth night we’ll understand that the storm is never going to end and there’s never going to being anything else than what we have right now.”

The full interview can be read at Charles Coté’s blog.

For the week of January 24, 2011, Publishers Weekly included two forthcoming poetry volumes by veteran Boa Editions authors!

Christopher Kennedy’s Ennui Prophet and the collaborative poems of John Gallaher and G.C.Waldrep, collected in Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, were both among this week’s poetry selections. Your Father on the Train of Ghosts was also included in Publishers Weekly Top 10: Poetry!

Both books are very interesting explorations of the poetic form that Boa Editions is excited to include in its new titles for Spring 2011, and we are thrilled to see them getting early press.

Christopher Kennedy’s perspective is one that ”gazes through a slightly distorted lens to better see the world around us.” Publishers Weekly described the collection of prose-poems as “deeply personal explorations…and examinations.” 

Gallaher and Walderp’s collaborations have been heralded as “one of the most extensive” in American poetry. Their process is an interesting one– they wrote poems back and forth over the period of a year, and ultimately “a third ‘voice’ emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.” Publishers Weekly describes this voice as “haunting.”