BOA Editions Blog

Hey, Rochester! In addition to celebrating an early spring this April, it’s National Poetry Month! BOA Editions has partnered up with Rochester public radio WXXI for a recurring program, Poetry Moments. These potent jabs of poesy will include selections from BOA authors such as Tony Leuzzi, Barton Sutter, Aracelis Girmay, Lucille Clifton, and will be broadcast daily. For a full schedule of poetic moments, check out WXXI’s Poetry Moments page.

The 2nd Annual BOA Short Fiction Contest has begun! Entries will be accepted until May 31st, 2012. The winner will receive a $500 honorarium and have their book published in spring 2014 in BOA’s American Reader Series. BOA Publisher Peter Conners will read all entries and select the winning short fiction collection.

Complete guidelines, entry form, and contest information are available here: BOA Short Fiction Contest

Good luck!

The April 2012 issue of Gently Read Literature features two of BOA’s poets, Michael Waters and Carsten Rene Nielsen. Mike Walker reviewed Nielsen’s poetry collection, House Inspections, translated by David Keplinger. Walker believes Nielsen has a distinct voice and gives praise to the translation that replicates the tone and feel of the original Danish version. Walker says, “Nielsen creates sketches of place and typical actions of the day as if his words slipped off a journal’s page.”

Gerry LaFemina reviewed Michael Water’s poetry collection, Gospel Night. After re-reading Gospel Night, LaFemina says it is like “taking a poetic journey in both time and space.” LaFemina also says, “Waters is a poet of the eye and ear, a poet of the world in all its sublime and profane beauty.” The review highlights Water’s playful lines and sense of rhyme.

Read the two engaging reviews here.

The collections are must-reads, and can be purchased in BOA’s Bookstore by clicking on the title, House Inspections and Gospel Night.

Under normal circumstances receiving a shipment of galleys is just another day at the office. But when it’s the galley for The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 it becomes a cause for celebration! Join us in a toast on this milestone toward the book’s Sept. 11 2012 publication. It’s a great day for poetry!

Peter Conners and Melissa Hall toast the arrival of galleys for The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

Hugh Martin. 2012 Poulin Prize Winner.

Hugh Martin is the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner for his first collection of poems, The Stick Soldiers. Cornelius Eady selected this manuscript and will write a Foreword to the published collection. Martin will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in March, 2013, in the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America Series.

An annual competition, the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize is open to poets who have yet to publish a full-length-book collection of poetry. This year’s runner-ups were The Reformation by Katherine Bode-Lang and Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes by Kerrin McCadden. Hugh Martin’s winning manuscript was chosen from a field of over 500 entries.

Hugh Martin says, “It is an honor to be selected for the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. My sincere gratitude goes out to Cornelius Eady, Peter Conners, and BOA Editions for selecting my manuscript. It’s exciting to know that these poems will get out into the world with such a fantastic press.”

BOA Editions will accept manuscripts for the 12th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize between August 1, 2012 and November 30, 2012.  An entry form and fee are required. The guidelines and final judge for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize will be announced on www.boaeditions.org later this year.

Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq war and a graduate of Muskingum University. His chapbook, So, How Was The War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center. He is finishing his MFA at Arizona State and will be a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in the fall of 2012.

Cornelius Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets. His numerous awards include an NEA Fellowship in Literature and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of several books of poetry including the critically acclaimed Hardheaded Weather (Penguin, 2008), which has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. He currently holds the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Congratulations, Hugh! Many thanks to Cornelius Eady for serving as final judge for the competition and to all the poets who submitted their manuscripts!

We wanted to give you a quick update on the status of the Poulin Prize. Our esteemed judge Cornelius Eady has selected a winner! However… we need to confirm that the poet he selected will accept the prize before we make a formal announcement. We have a call in to that person (Hey, check your voice mail!) and will let you know the results as soon as possible. We’re as eager to share the news as you are to hear it!

Cornelius Eady. Poulin Prize Judge.

In case you haven’t checked out literary blog The Rumpus in the past week, we are proud to inform you that Aimee Parkison’s short story “Theater of Cruelty” from her latest collection The Innocent Party was selected for their Sunday Fiction series! Hop over to the Sunday Fiction page to give it a read. If you are unfamiliar with Aimee’s work, now’s your chance to get yourself acquainted; this atmospheric piece will have you pinned until the end.

Aimee’s amazing new collection The Innocent Party will be officially published in May. BUT, it can be purchased directly through BOA’s secure web-store and shipped to you today!

Purchase the book here:  The Innocent Party,

Craig Morgan Teicher. BOA Author.

HTML Giant has turned their “Author Spotlight” on BOA author Craig Morgan Teicher. In the interview, Craig discusses his fable collection, Cradle Book, and says things like, “Sleep and fear have always been closely related to me. What is scarier than sleeping? Who knows what somebody will do to you while you’re sleeping? Or what you will do to yourself while dreaming. Oh—sleep is the scariest thing in the world. It’s like we die every day. To me, silence, fear and sleep are pretty much the same thing.”

If you think this is a particularly insightful interview, then have we got a book – two books, actually – for you.

Craig’s new poetry collection, To Keep Love Blurry, will be published by BOA in Sept. 2012. Here’s what D.A. Powell says about the collection:

“The closing couplet of a sonnet or a Shakespearean scene signals a swift turn and the lingering note of finality that will continue to resonate so dramatically that it literally gives us pause. Teicher takes this familiar pattern as a starting point and varies his reinvention of it so thoroughly as to sound the heavens with its infinite measures. Herein, a long period of grief for which there is no comfort in form. A salacious glance at bodies reined in by exacting rhymes. A liberating push-back against the idea of economy. More play, more improvisation, and more defiantly deadpan humor–this is the vital shot-in-the-arm American poetry needs. And who would have thought it would arrive in such a disarmingly honest voice? The brilliance of these poems is how they renovate not only poetry but language, without pretense, without the declaration of war, without summoning the ghost of Shakespeare in any but the most charming ways. I could live in the mind of these poems and never want to leave. The nice thing is, as a guest at Teicher’s party in poetry’s honor: I get to dally among the roses.”

But that’s not all! Fall 2012 will also see the BOA publication of a collection of interviews with poets by Tony Leuzzi. Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words features the best of 5 years of in-depth interviews that Leuzzi has conducted with some of America’s most compelling, provocative, and accomplished poets. What names? How about  Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirshfield, Patricia Smith, and Martín Espada, for starters? The book crosses all poetry schools to bring you dispatches from the front lines of American poetry in the words of the poets themselves.

For those keeping tabs, BOA’s fall 2012 line-up looks like this:

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, edited by Kevin Young & Michael S. Glaser, Foreword by Toni Morrison, Afterword by Kevin Young (published Sept 2012)

To Keep Love Blurry poems by Craig Morgan Teicher (published Sept 2012)

Theophobia poems by Bruce Beasley (published Oct 2012)

Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words interviews by Tony Leuzzi (published Nov 2012)

Diadem: Selected Poems of Marosa di Giorgio translated by Adam Giannelli (published Nov 2012)

So save your pennies, poetry lovers… there’s never too much BOA and you’re gonna want all of these in your collection!

With generous help from the Lannan Foundation, BOA Editions will be publishing Lucille Clifton’s collected works in a volume featuring a foreword by Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison, afterword by noted poet Kevin Young, and statements of support from former Poet-Laureate  W.S. Merwin, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou. This monumental collection will include all of Clifton’s published poems as well as previously uncollected, unpublished early, middle and later poems. For more about the Lannan Foundation and the BOA Editions Challenge Grant,  jump over to the Lannan Foundation’s website.

In the review written by John Bradley for the new issue of Rain Taxi, Bradley highlights Nielsen’s prose and how the poems in House Inspections take us into a dream world where everyday objects take on a new meaning. Bradley emphasizes how Nielsen’s tone is objective and leaves the reader in a state of awe. Bradley says, “The prose poem’s affinity for the surreal, however, should be celebrated, as should Nielsen’s skill at plumbing the strangeness of the human psyche. House Inspections offers tantalizing mysteries for a world all too often gnawing on its own cynicism.”

Born in 1966, Carsten René Nielsen is the author of nine books of poetry. His poetry has been featured in magazines in Italy, Germany, Canada and the US. His most recent translated collection, House Inspections, is published by BOA. Nielsen lives in Aarhus, in Denmark.

The BOA publication, House Inspections, can be purchased here. And if you would like to suscribe or check out Rain Taxi click here.