The staff of BOA Editions is gearing up for a nice holiday break. From the top to the bottom of our hearts, we thank you for supporting BOA Editions in 2011. We look forward to a 2012 full of more great books and good times. Onward into the New Year! 

Happy Holidays from BOA Editions!

The Jan/Feb issue of Poets & Writers is themed as “The New Year’s Guide to an Inspired Writing Life.” As most writers will tell you, inspiration is a mirage floating in the distance reachable only by years of hard work. However, what artist can deny that there are the occasional “flashes” that may well be described as inspiration?

Whatever your view of “inspiration” we’re pleased to have Janice N. Harrington and Deborah Brown spotlighted in the issue. Both are past winners of BOA’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize contest with their books Walking the Dog’s Shadow (Deborah Brown) and Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (Janice N. Harrington). Harrington’s book also went on to win the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award. This year, we published her second full-length collection, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home. 

Janice N. Harrington

The Hands of Strangers portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers.  The poems show aides as anonymous figures laboring under routines, time clocks, and a distant medical hierarchy.  They tell also tell the stories of how the nursing home industry reshapes lives, bodies, and identities of both aides and the aged. Harrington – who worked in nursing homes during college - explained the ”inspiration” for the book: “Like many of the ‘girls’ I worked with, I was young and inexperienced in a workplace that demanded empathy, skill, and compassion for the needs and stories of the elderly. I worked my way through college as a nurses’ aide.  I wrote The Hands of Strangers because I cannot forget the ‘girls’ I worked with or the ‘residents’ under my care.  I haven’t forgotten what I saw, heard, felt, or learned. Human stories hide behind the walls, the national statistics, and the isolations of institutionalized aging.  I wanted to share some of those stories.”

In Poets & Writers online feature on inspiration she begins, “Inspiration? A sleepless night helps, when my mind has nothing to do but wander. I’m also inspired by…” 

Read the rest of Janice’s inspirations here [Janice N. Harrington on Inspiration] 

Deborah Brown

Deborah Brown is profiled in the Inspiration issue’s feature “Our Seventh Annual Look at Debut Poets” in celebration of her debut collection, Walking the Dog’s Shadow. The book was selected by Tony Hoagland as winner of BOA’s 2010 Poulin Prize. Hoagland also wrote a Foreword for the collection.

In the Poets & Writers feature Brown describes how her book began to take shape. “The book evolved over years. It’s at least my third complete manuscript, and it doesn’t resemble the first or even the second very much at all. Writing the book was a matter of working on individual poems and, as my writing developed, seeing how they fit together.”

The feature goes on to talk about the writers who inspire her, the amount of time it took to write the book (”Twenty years, give or take, depending on which manuscript you count”) and other interesting tidbits about the debut author who gives her age as, “I am a member of the AARP.”

Congratulations to Deborah Brown and Janice N. Harrington for being poets who “inspire” us all!

On December 2nd, BOA author Naomi Shihab Nye was in Buffalo, New York to read from her most recent collection, Transfer, as part of the Babel international author series, offered since 2007 by the Just Buffalo Literary Center. Just Buffalo also selected Transfer for “If All of Buffalo Read the Same Book,” a community-wide reading program that encourages everyone to read and discuss the same title at the same time.

Before Naomi read, Mike Kelleher—poet and artistic director at Just Buffalo—gave a wonderful introduction that considered the many meanings of the word “transfer” in the collection. Below are some photographs from the event and a transcript of Mike’s remarks.

All photographs by Bruce Jackson (http://babelphotos.us)

Introduction for Naomi Shihab Nye

Welcome to the second installment of our Babel season. We’re very excited to present Naomi Shihab Nye this evening. For “If All of Buffalo Read the Same Book,” we chose her new collection of poems, Transfer, which she’ll be reading from and discussing tonight. Transfer, I should note, was published by our friends at BOA Editions in Rochester. It’s nice, for once, to be able to showcase a book that was not published by Random House. It’s doubly nice to able to showcase a book published outside of Manhattan. Our friends from BOA are here tonight, so let’s give them a hand.

At our Babel book discussion at Betty’s on Monday night, Professor Jim Holstun’s opening question to the group was about the title. He asked the group: What are some of the different meanings the title takes on as you read through the book? I am not sure it was a question many had thought about for too long, but one by one the hands began to go up, each one finding new significance in this simple, two-syllable word.

In the poem from which the book takes its title, “Scared, Scarred, Sacred,” Nye tells the story of accompanying her father to a movie theatre to see “The Wizard of Oz.” On the bus ride home, the young Naomi notices a ticket in her father’s hand. She asks him what it is for. He tells her it’s a transfer for another bus, when we get off this one. In the next section of the poem, she recalls her father’s love of travel, and how he used to save all the pink transfer tags he’d pulled off his suitcases.

As in much of Naomi Shihab Nye’s work, it is the experience of the quotidian that leads her, and us, into a more profound understanding of the world. Her father’s transfers are literal, utilitarian objects in the real world: one gets you on the next bus, the other, hopefully, gets your luggage onto the next plane, and so on. However, as we move through the book with these tickets and tags in our minds, we see that the word “transfer” begins to mean much more.

One of the hands that rose in our book discussion brought up the fact that a “transfer” is also a movement from one place to another, how this could describe Naomi’s father, a Palestinian by birth, being transferred from his ancestral homeland to the U.S. after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Another hand rose to suggest that “transfer” also meant the conveyance of property from one party to another, and how one of the poems deals with this very question when Naomi’s father returns to Palestine, having inherited his mother’s land, and must decide whether to hold on or sell it, aware always that the transfer of that property has serious consequences depending on whether he sells it to a Palestinian or an Israeli.

Still another hand rose, talking about the way “transfer” works in the relationship between father and daughter. How the father’s death was a kind of transfer from one state of being to another. How Naomi’s book was a transfer of the hopes and griefs and fears and joys of the father to his daughter, the poet, who hoped to transfer these ideas to the page, where they could then be transferred to the reader.

In short, we could have gone on all night. I did not raise my hand during this part of the discussion, but it stayed with me after I went home. I thought I remembered that “transfer” was a root meaning of the word “metaphor.” But then I questioned myself, because I also seemed to remember that it was a root meaning of the word “translation.” I got out my dictionary to happily discover that “transfer” is a root meaning of both “metaphor” and “translation.”

What makes Naomi Shihab Nye’s work so exciting, I think, is that her grasp of the everyday opens up the mundane to reveal the world. This is, ultimately, an act of translation. That a bus transfer ticket can become a metaphor for both the conundrum of Middle Eastern geopolitics and the mourning of a daughter for her dead father, is an insight we are all fortunate enough to have Naomi Shihab Nye here to share with us.

Please join me in welcoming her to Buffalo.

–Mike Kelleher

TODAY is the DAY to

FOR BOA

 ROCtheDay is a 24 hour online giving event

(like a telethon without the phones)

until midnight tonight

 click the link below to donate, and help BOA publish

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton

Yes, I want to ROC the Day for BOA!

Two international BOA authors have recently received recognition on the world stage!

Francisca Aguirre – author of Ithaca which was translated by Ana Valverde Osan and published by BOA in 2004 – was just awarded the prestigious Spanish poetry award, Premio Nacional de Poesia. This is the most recent award for Ms. Aguirre who earned the Leopoldo Panero Poetry award when Ithaca was originally published in Spain in 1971. Ithaca is a 50-page poem that reworks the Greek myth of Odysseus, but with one important alteration: The story is told from Penelope’s perspective. Ithaca was – and remains – a landmark publication and BOA is proud to be its U.S. publisher. We congratulate Francisca Aguirre on her most recent recognition.

Ithaca by Francisca Aguirre

Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov just received a rare – and rave – review in the German magazine Der Spiegel for his poetry. BOA published Mr. Madzirov’s U.S. debut Remnants of Another Age - which was translated by Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat, and Adam Reed – just this year. The book carries an Introduction by Carolyn Forche and was endorsed by Adam Zagajewski, Tomaz Salamun, and BOA’s own Li-Young Lee who wrote, “Nikola Madzirov’s poems move mysteriously by means of a profound inner concentration, giving expression to the deepest laws of the mind. Their linguistic ’making’ is informed by a vivid evidence of serious self-making, soul-making, and heart-making. We are lucky to have these English incarnations of Nikola Madzirov.”

Remnants of Another Age by Nikola Madzirov

The review in Der Spiegel reads, in part, “The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Tomas Transtromer has recently put the literary spotlight on poetry; this type of silent communication mysteriously asserts itself next to the prose Blockbusters. Now the first book of a poet from Macedonia has been translated into German, which is similar in quality to the poems of the aged Swede. The poems of Nikola Madzirov, 38, are genuine and frank; they put up no barriers whatsoever, except for empathy and concentration.”

Here at BOA, we continue to take pride in all our international authors and their peerless translators. We also give thanks to the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, New Mexico – the namesake of our Lannan Translations Selection Series and the angels who provide funding for the continuation of the series.

We hope you will take the time to discover the world through our international poetry series!