Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Travis Smith’s review of Ennui Prophet, a BOA publication, in The Carolina Quarterly emphasizes Kennedy’s dark humor and eye for the surreal image, which make his poems enjoyable to read. Smith also connects Kennedy to Baudelaire, making several references throughout the review. The review states, “Kennedy has clearly studied up on his Spleen. Like Baudelaire, Kennedy’s depressed speakers often find themselves yearning for other realities, to see the world with a renewed sense of enchantment.”

Christopher Kennedy is currently the Director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. He has published various collections of poetry. His writing has appeared in print and electronic journals including Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Double Room, and Del Sol Review among many others.

Gather ’round readers, BOA poet Wyn Cooper has been featured on Slate.com this week!

The website has posted Cooper’s poem, “Movement,” along with an audio clip of him reading it.

This is a real treat considering that his poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, CrazyHorse, and more than 75 other magazines. The man can write!

So click here and check it out, come back, post a comment, and tell us what you think!

Also, Cooper has recently released a collection of sonnets, Chaos is the New Calm, which you should also check out by clicking here

Should you find yourself in Syracuse, NY this Friday (Feb 3, 2012), you should definitely check out BOA poet Janice Harrington’s reading at the YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center!

Janice Harrington’s first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions as well as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, which was also published by BOA Editions, came out in 2011. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry.

Harrington will be reading from both of her books of poetry this Friday and if you haven’t read them already, believe me, they are truly remarkable.

Again, the reading is this Friday (Feb 3, 2012) at 7:00 pm and since Valentines Day is right around the corner, you should probably bring a date!

For directions to the Y’s Downtown Writer’s Center click here, the address is 340 Montgomery Street, Syracuse, NY 13202

click here for a copy of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home

At the beginning of Mike Walker’s review of The Hands of Strangers by Janice  Harrington, a Boa Editions publication, Walker  acknowledges the difficulty an artist might encounter his attempts to render the voices of a marginalized people clearly, without suffering arrivals at heavy-handedness and cliche. Walker writes, “If you are going to entitle a poem ‘Old Photos’ in a book dedicated to life in the nursing home, you’d better be a true master with words and also be able to conjure a tale alive in very fast time,” a challenge to which “Harrington rises…time and time again.” An exploration of the shelved lives of the elderly, Harrington’s collection of poems enters a realm of things forgotten and lost; her subjects suffer immobility both within the planes of physicality and in navigating those of memory, the two losses often intertwined with one another. And though the  poems approach the difficulties of old age, the environments where they manifest themselves most helplessly with inspiring humility, as Walker writes in his review, “The impressive aspect isn’t in the empathy for both the elderly patient and the patient nurse that Harrington conveys but the nuanced, careful, way with words she applies in her approach to description.” Walker’s insight here aligns  Harrington’s work with the defense for all poetry;   the reason we read it–for the way the music of language can be scrupulously chosen and arranged in order to grant us entry into bigger-picture truths, line-by-line  letting us feel more palpably their every lift and prod. Janice Harrington published her first book of poems Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone with BOA Editions in 2007, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois. For writings by Mike Walker and other curiosities,  head over to Coal Hill Review.

Insightful and astute in his examinations of Alan Michael Parker’s writings, Colin Winnette of WordRiot.org had an illuminating interview with the BOA author earlier this month. The conversation between the two elicited discussion about the “boundaries between what a reader knows and learns,” specifically when it comes to interpretations of various genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction.

Winnette asks fantastic questions which really get to the core of Parker’s thoughts, recurring themes, and literary elements. In a way, this piece is a thorough and captivating review of Parker’s work, as much as it is an interview with the author.

Parker, who has written works of poetry, novels, short fiction, non-fiction essays and criticism, and edited collections, tries to explore the boundaries between what a reader knows and learns. Poems should teach the reader how to read. All writings: poems, novels, short stories, should put your perceptions at risk; though some genres do this through sentences, and some through lines. Some works have music-like quality, like poetry, while others – like paragraphs – have wholeness as acts of thought.

What can we expect from a piece or collection of poetry? What is it that poetry can and should do to and for the reader? What is the fundamental difference between poetry and fiction? Is it structural, aesthetic? Find out how Parker and Winnette approach these problems and more over at WordRiot.

Forget the OSCARS; the 2011 National Book Critics Award is the prize worth watching out for, especially since Aracelis Girmay’s sophomore collection of poems Kingdom Animalia, published by BOA Editions, has been nominated in the category for poetry.  The award “honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature.” The National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, which is elected annually,  nominates five authors for each category including autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Past winners in the category of poetry include CD Wright, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Louise Glück. This year’s winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on Thursday, March 8, at 6:00 p.m. at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York. Go, Aracelis!

This week at the Rumpus, poetry editor Brian Spears speaks with Barbara Jane Reyes on oral poetry, creation myths, Avatar, and getting paid. Particularly interesting points include discussion on balancing the perpetuation of formal boundaries in poetry with the integrity of traditional Filipino culture, as well as the fetishization of native cultures in art and literature. If you have yet to read Reyes’ newest book of poems Diwata, published by BOA Editions in 2010, this interview will surely have you visiting the BOA bookstore to order your own copy. Additionally,  you can find further insights embedded within the interview from Brian Spears, whose sensitivity and humor serve to illuminate and provoke the kind of thoughtful responses one would hope to hear in any conversation. For more interviews, comics, and to sign up for “overly personal” emails from Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott, click here. See links to get your swag on with more BOA news and works from our all-star roster of authors .

Poet Nikola Madzirov, whose collection Remnants of Another Age was published by Boa Editions March 2011, has been showcased in the Oxford Brookes Poetry Center’s Poem of the Week service, selecting his poem “The One Who Writes.” In case you haven’t subscribed to the Poem of the Week newsletter, which you can easily do by clicking here, each week, the Poetry Centre sends out works “from new poets and established names, from sections of sequences to works in translation,” to your inbox, helping to foster connections between poets, academics, and poetry readers.

You can read “The One Who Writes,” and other selected poems here.

To buy Remnants of Another Age, visit the Boa Bookstore.

Watch Weekly Poem: From ‘Movements Forward, Movements Away’ on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

PBS NewsHour is featuring Peter Conners, publisher at BOA Editions, as their Poet of the Week due to his imaginative prose in “Movements Forward, Movements Away.” The poem captures the reader from the beginning till end. Watch the video above to hear Peter’s reading or click here to visit PBS to read the excerpt as well.

GO PETER!!!!!

BOA author Aimee Parkison

So as a BOA intern I spend a lot of my time here surfing some of the stranger corners of the web, but every now and again I’m sent to a website that is genuinely awesome.

The Nervous Breakdown.com is one such site.

TNB, for me at least, just has the perfect balance of intellectualism, youthfulness and that intangible coolness to it.

Anyways, not too long ago TNB had a “Six Question Sex Interview” with BOA poet, Aimee Parkison in light of her recent work in Men Undressed. The new title is a collection of short stories about sex from a male character’s point of view, written entirely by female authors, such as Kristin Thiel, Susan Minot, Elizabeth Benedict, Alicia Erian, Diane William, and of course, Aimee Parkison.

When recollecting her first experience reading of Parkison’s work, TNB interviewer Gina Frangello explains that “[…]the way Parkison wove formal experimentalism with intense characterization and psychology let me know immediately that she was a writer with something new to impart, who could titillate both the brain and the emotions in equal measures.”

Given how interesting the premise for this collection is on its own and the caliber of writers attached to it, it’s hard to imagine that the result is anything less than astounding,  but Parkison makes it clear that there’s always a risk when writing about …gasp… sex.

“It’s a risk because it might seem like the work ‘isn’t right’ for the literary audience.  However, Men Undressed tries to break those boundaries by providing serious fiction about sex and desire – something that might appeal to many different types of readers – the sophisticated literary audience and also readers who like erotica and want to read sex in a new way.” – Parkison

Much like the rest of the website, the interview is fun, intelligent, and easily approached, so give it a read and definitely checkout the rest of the website to see what’s up.

Lastly, Parkison’s next book The Innocent Party will be published by BOA Editions May 15th of this year! Be excited!

Click Here for the Interview

and Here for a copy of Men Undressed

and Here for Parkison’s author page on the BOA website

Oh and Here for more fiction work by BOA authors