Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

Craig Morgan Teicher’s Cradle Book, which was published in 2010 as part of BOA’s American Readers Series, has recently been selected as an Editor’s Favorites pick for Summer 2011 by Cerise Press. In Teicher’s debut collection of short stories, “[m]ortality permeates… With piercing brevity, he features villagers and personified animals who endure an austere existence… Teicher imbues portraits of melancholy with truth-telling that elucidate the brutal yet wondrous mysteries between ’silence and sound,’” writes Editor Karen Rigby.

You can purchase Cradle Book here.

Spot Cradle Book at Cerise Press here.

According to Rattle, Madzirov uses a speaker that conveys much by presenting issues that are “shown to the reader rather than described.”  The voice of the poems’ speaker is unique and refreshing as it creates an air of privacy.  The reader becomes a witness as he or she is placed outside the “you” and “we”s of the poetry.  Rather than speaking for the reader, Madzirov invites the reader to watch the scenes he creates.

The theme of “outsiderness” is very present in Madzirov’s collection.  This theme transforms “just those mundane things that the histories of the world ignore” into “what constitutes life.”  Ordinary, everyday things are turned, through Madzirov’s poetry, into things with great emotional ties and value.  In this way, Madzirov creates a voice that speaks with “freshness and power” for the displaced, overlooked, and wandering.

For the full review, follow the link here.

Remnants of Another Age, by Nikola Madzirov. BOA author.

Nikola Madzirov. BOA poet.

Nikola Madzirov’s bilingual Macedonian-English collection of poetry,  Remnants of Another Age (published by BOA Editions), received a glowing review from World Literature Today.  The review comments on the beautiful integration of spiritual and physical, past and future, personal and universal.  Madzirov’s poetry evokes elements of mythology which aids in unifying the variety of themes he addresses.

Nikola Madzirov interlaces all aspects of reality into lyrical and moving work.  His poetry features both the history of the Balkan region as well as his own personal lived experiences and reflections.  Madzirov looks through historical and mythical perspectives to communicate the “migrations, exiles, and wars that were waged in the Balkans” but also “reveals his private and personal mythology.”  Complete with spiritual and physical elements, this collection presents Madzirov’s “superbly modern religious imagination” that bring together the past and the present into “the return home” and “the remnants of bygone ages.”

For the full review, follow the link here.

Adam McOmber, the author of BOA’s This New and Poisonous Air, had a recent discussion with Time Out Chicago’s Jonathan Messinger about the historical elements in his new book. Though all of the tales in his debut collection of short stories are steeped in the uncanny and the macabre, McOmber says that he is “really interested in using elements of the fantastic in a serious way, not the whimsical elements of the fantastic you see in some short stories.” His draw to history is apparent as well, as in his stories “The Automatic Garden,” and “There Are No Bodies Such as This,” both of which take actual figures from history as their principal characters.

In speaking of the historical figures he adopts as characters, McOmber also speaks of his love of history and attention to detail, which combines in his work with his incredible imagination to produce something altogether otherworldly. “I am interested in history, but a lot of my fiction has to do with escaping and the imagination… I do a lot of research so there are authentic details, but that allows for even more escape, even for me as a writer. I don’t have to think about my current surroundings. I have to think of something outside myself.” In speaking of the life of Madame Tussaud, the celebrated creator of the now-famous wax figures which bear her name and the main character of “There Are No Bodies Such as These,” McOmber says “I would say I manipulated Madame Tussaud’s history somewhat, but the interesting thing is that she manipulated her own history… Certainly I did research, but getting inside the dream life was fun for me.”

And everywhere in the tale is found as well McOmber’s “intricate, beautiful and horrifying” prose, a “density of language” which he describes as “difficult to get into [...], but once you get into it, [you] you get swept up in the poetry of it.” Says Messinger, “The story uses carefully gilded elements of psychological horror to explore the depths of the characters’ emotions… [M]any of McOmber’s stories [prove] to be a numinous place, an impassable puzzle box with its own idiosyncratic key. ”

You can read the full article here.

This New And Poisonous Air is available for purchase here.

Craig Morgan Teicher’s Cradle Book recently received a glowing review from blogger Tracy K. Smith over at The Best American Poetry. Relating an episode from her own college days when one of her professors spent the first half hour of her first class of the term reading Italo Calvino’s “The Parrot” aloud, Smith unearths the “large, strange order to which even we- in our post-post modern moment- are subject,” and the inexorable draw to fables and folk tales which we all find in ourselves. “I think they speak to a place in us that is very similar to where poems reach us. That spot that is nourished by a different kind of sense- one that often confounds (or acts as an antidote to) the day-to-day nature of things,” Smith writes.

It is this captivating, lyrically poetic quality of Teicher’s short stories which leads her to link his work with that of Italo Calvino, author of such works as Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics. Smith notes the allegorical, fable-like feel of Teicher’s pieces, saying, “[his] prose hits home in a way that is similar to aphorism. There’s a wisdom that feel wholly original and yet familiar on an ur-level. Reading, I was continually struck by the feeling of having stepped into a happy reunion with something that i probably, perhaps, once, without realizing it, knew.”

“Cradle Book is incredibly rich and incredibly slim, incongruously small considering all it contains. To quote Teicher’s story, ‘The Red Cipher,’ it is ‘[l]ike those unusual houses that are much bigger on the inside than their exteriors suggest,’ as if each tale opens up a kind of hall of mirrors, something flickering into the distance in such a way as to suggest a path… This is a book to read aloud, to spend time under the spell of. Like the older fables Teicher must have had in his mind and ears when these were written, the stories in Cradle Book slip easily into the region of a reader’s imagination where a good story is capable of waylaying danger, and where impenetrable mystery is realer and more relevant than what we see, by day, through our actual eyes.”

Cradle Book, published by BOA in 2010, is available for purchase here.

Read the rest of Tracy K. Smith’s review here.

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.

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.

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