Archive for May, 2011

If you’ve been debating whether or not to submit to the BOA Short Fiction Prize… it’s time to pull the trigger. Submissions must be postmarked today!

The winner receives publication by BOA Editions in the American Reader Series in Spring 2013 and a $500 Honorarium. All submissions will be read by BOA Publisher Peter Conners who will also make the final selection.

Here are the complete guidelines: [BOA Short Fiction Prize]

Good luck to those who submitted!

In a rave review, BOA poet Christopher Kennedy’s Ennui Prophet is called “a bastion of cool,” and “at times the literary equivalent of an unnerving smirk.”

The reviewer, Michael Costello, is writing for the blog We Who Are About to Die, and heaps heavy praise on Kennedy’s latest volume of prose poems, which is set to launch in less than a week.

“These are the surreal scenarios of a propheteering mind awash in the weariness expressed by the title,” the reviewer muses, then also crediting Kennedy with both “graphic power and verbal economy a la Hemingway, but with his own inventiveness.”

The rest of the review is available here.

Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy will be avalible for purchase in June 2011, and is available for pre-order now.

Recently, book reviewer Craig Santos Perez interviewed Barbara Jane Reyes about her poetic process and recent book, Diwata, for part of his series through Jacket2, Last Commentator In Paradise. They talk extensively and thoughtfully about many elements of her creative process and focus. They talk also about where she’s been, as a writer, and where she’s going next.

When asked about the mythos of her writing, she talks about the complexities of storytelling and perspective, and her great love of traditional storytelling methods. Among many other things, she says,

“I am always looking for someone other than myself to ‘tell the story,’ or to be the speaker, as I prefer to think about my own stories, and those of my family, within the context of these larger cultural and historical narratives. If my grandfather survived the war (WWII), for example, then what did his ancestors survive? Because I can’t knowledgeably answer this question, because I don’t know the names of so many of my ancestors, because I do not know the details of their lives, I invent, I speculate, I turn to myth-making.

[...]

I wonder about other perspectives on a well-known enough story. What voices have we not heard, what perspectives do we take for granted or neglect or fail to consider? Whose versions of the story are suppressed or repressed and why?”

The ideas of perspective and giving voice to the silent are pervasive throughout the dialogue, and later Reyes also admits, “I have come to poetry because it is a place for those suppressed voices to speak, and to do so beautifully.”

Through her thoughtful responses and Perez’s equally thoughtful and reactive questions, much of the spirit of Reyes’s culture, writing style and ethos, and sincerity shine through. The conversation is one well worth reading, full of literary allusions and references to themes, folklore, and specific poems and styles used throughout Diwata.

Through the interview it is clear that Reyes devotes a great amount of love and labor to her artistic form, and uses it as a fundamental lens for the world: “poetry is the thing which allows me to translate, understand, participate in this world, to be of this place.”

The entire interview is available here.

Diwata is now available for purchase.

Although we posted before about BOA’s first ever Pop-Up Poetry Reading at Rochester Contemporary Arts Center, back in April, we thought we’d share these beautiful pictures of the event.

Bernadette Catalana, BOA Board Chair	Jonathan Everitt, BOA Board member
Jonathan reading, with Jack in the background

Jack Langerak, BOA Board Member	Bernadette talking with Jack
	Cindy Rogers, BOA Board Member

All photographs courtesy of Will Ingalls.

Future BOA Editions Pop-Up Poetry Events are in the works–check back here to find out more!

We want to extend a special congrats to BOA author Aracelis Girmay and translator Deniz Perin!

Aracelis’ forthcoming collection, Kingdom Animalia, has been chosen as the Rumpus Poetry Book Club Selection for August. The club makes copies of the book available one month prior to its publication date and also features interviews with selected authors. It’s a wonderful way to spread the word about outstanding new poetry books and an auspicious start for Kingdom Animalia. Find out more about the Rumpus Poetry Book Club here: http://therumpus.net/the-rumpus-poetry-book-club/. Kingdom Animalia is being published in September as winner of BOA’s 2011 Isabella Gardner Award.

BOA translator Deniz Perin has received a Lannan Residency Fellowship. She will be a resident in Marfa, TX, from June 8 to July 8. As part of the fellowship, she will also be doing a reading on June 2nd at the Marfa Bookstore and she will be interviewed on their local radio station. Deniz translated Book of the Edge by Turkish poet Ece Temelkuran.

Congratulations to Aracelis and Deniz on their well-deserved honors!

Aracelis Girmay, BOA poet

In their Spring 2011 issue, the Review of Contemporary Fiction featured BOA author Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, published Fall 2010.

The reviewer notes that each story within the collection consciously collects “small yet luminous moments into some larger mosaic.” Germanacos’s prose is lauded for “the sharp glimmer” which each mosaic-like story possesses, further lending “an entire universe of meaning” to each individual tale.

Among other praise for the book was the following:

“Germanacos’s evocative prose delivers precise and lasting images in a series of vignettes, each carefully crafted with a minimalist’s patience and a maximalist’s ambition. For all their aesthetic refinement, however, Germanacos’s stories contain compelling human dramas, exploring such themes as the fluidity of bodies, identities, gender, and sexuality, as well as joy, loneliness, and love. Thus, even when Germanacos is at her most surreal and elusive–as she radicalizes notions of identity and human relationships–the stories retain a clarity and a core that grounds them in the world of human emotions.”

To read the rest of the review, pick up a copy of The Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 2011 Edition (Vol. XXXI). Anne Germanacos’s In the Time of the Girls is available for purchase now.

Dear Short Fiction Writers,

Time to print those pages and peel those stamps! There’s only 13 days left to mail in your submssion for the 1st BOA Short Fiction Prize. The winner receives publication by BOA Editions in the American Reader Series in Spring 2013 and a $500 Honorarium. All submissions will be read by BOA Publisher Peter Conners who will also make the final selection.

Here are the complete guidelines: [BOA Short Fiction Prize]

We hope to read your submission soon!

Sincerely,

BOA

Head West out of Rochester on Interstate 90 and within an hour you’ll hit Buffalo. Or you can just click on the below link and get a taste of literary Buffalo through the eyes of R.D. Pohl of the Buffalo News. This week, R.D. celebrates the Best Translated Book of the Year Award for The Book of Things by Slovenian poet Aleš Šteger, translated by noted poet and translator Brian Henry:

“BOA Editions, Ltd., the Rochester, New York based small press with an outsized literary reputation, added another honor to its collection last month when University of Richmond based poet Brian Henry’s English-language translation of Slovenian poet Aleš Šteger’s “The Book of Things” received the 2011 Best Translated Book Award in poetry.”

Read the whole article here [The Book of Things  wins Best Translated Book Award]

BOA poet Ales Steger. Photo by Joze Suhadolnik.

Barbara Jane Reyes. BOA Poet. Photo by Peter Dressel.

In Craig Santos Perez’s recent interview,  Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Diwata,  discusses with her trademark candor and precision the origins of her poems, her relationship with the traditions of story-telling, and her ever expanding vision of poetry.

The interview begins with an exploration of Barbara’s cultural concerns in which she acknowledges that she is “always looking for someone other than [herself] to ‘tell the story,’ or to be the speaker,” exploring those stories “within the context of these larger cultural and historical narratives.”

The scope of the interview continues to widen from there, covering a range of Barbara’s interests. When asked if she sees her work “bridging between different cultural stories,” Barbara poignantly responds:

“Already, poetry is the thing which allows me to translate, understand, participate in this world, to be of this place. That may not be good enough for some; it does sound esoteric. But specific to my poetry, yes I do think of it as an effort to bridge my cultural and diasporic experiences. And really, it’s that neither here nor there, both here and there, not Filipino enough, not American enough feeling, which you may call diasporic or transnational experience, which informs my readings and listenings, and ultimately, my poetics. I am drawn to poems and stories in which the storyteller/poet uses the poem/story to figure out her state of being multiple and hybrid. It’s satisfying to see this worked out elegantly in language and form. I used to write in fracture, but now that doesn’t feel right, to accept an identity and language that is fracture (even using the term, “subtracted bilingual,” feels like acquiescing to fracure). So then “bridge,” could be its opposite.”

Read more of Barbara’s interview at Jacket 2:

Talking with Barbara Jane Reyes

The literary blog We Who Are About to Die not only sports one of the best titles in lit blogdom, but they have good taste too. Witness this excerpt from Michael Costello’s review of Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy:

“Not only is Ennui Prophet a bastion of cool, it is a true pleasure of craft and originality. Christopher Kennedy writes a world at turns emotionally haunting, descriptively vibrant,  and at times the literary equivalent of an unnerving smirk. There is an uneasiness about and an anxious thread stitching together line to line, poem to poem. These are the surreal scenarios of a propheteering mind awash in the weariness expressed by the title.”

Costello also took the time to make the connection between this book and musician/artist Robert Pollard of the legendary indie band Guided By Voices.

Intrigued?

You should be.

Read the whole review here [Divinely Inspired Listlessness]

Ennui Prophet, prose poems by Christopher Kennedy