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To help support publication of new titles, BOA Editions offers donors of $125 (or more) the option to be named as a contributor to books of their choice. For each $125 contributed, your name will be listed in the back of a book for our upcoming season.
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Below are descriptions of the 2012 titles. Please help keep contemporary poetry in print by doing what you can to support these books.
2012 Titles
A) Litany for the City by Ryan Teitman
Selected by Jane Hirshfield from over 600 manuscripts, Litany for the City is the winner of the 10th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Of Litany for the City, Hirshfield writes "I found in this manuscript a poet doing the work of real exploration, thinking and feeling his way through images of cities both real and metaphoric, inner and outer. This book carries both startling imaginative freedoms and the impulsion of a person navigating the terrain of his life by means of the star-chart and sextant of poems––a winning combination, for me."
B) True Faith by G.C. Waldrep & John Gallaher
Gerald Stern once referred to Ira Sadoff as "one of the supreme poets of his generation," who "belongs in every major anthology, every library." In his latest collection Sadoff playfully, ambiguously, ironically, and sometimes with stark emotional directness--immerse themselves in experience to search out the ongoing pleasures of living passionately and intensely. True Faith celebrates and sings of frailty and resilience, and ultimately the preciousness of life itself, reinvigorating Whitman's urgent question: "If we are not flashes and specks," what are we?
C) The Reindeer Camps by Barton Sutter
A winner of the Minnesota Book Award in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Barton Sutter’s latest collection details life on the Canadian border, presents portraits of northern plants and animals, rejoices in marriage, and traces the ancient ways of Siberian reindeer herders. The late Bill Holm called it “unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before.” Sutter’s poetry reminds us that other cultures have survived for millennia by living closer to the ground..
D) The Innocent Party by Aimee Parkison
Winner of the Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize, Aimee Parkison’s characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, “Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography.”
E) Folding Star by Jacek Gutorow
The Folding Star and Other Poems is a triumphant collection of poetry that will help change our understanding of Polish poetry in the United States. The steady gaze, surgical precision, and syntactical richness of Gutorow’s poems speak to unhurried and lasting meditations, which, in their turn, beg to be revised time and again.
F) The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton: 1965-2010 by Lucille Clifton
The culmination of a 40-year career by one of America's most revered poets, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton contains all of Clifton's published collections, in addition to more than 50 previously unpublished poems. In her introduction to The Collected Poems, Toni Morrison writes, "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness or they are eloquent elegies for the vulnerable and the prematurely dead. She sifts the history of African Americans for honor. She plumbs that history for justice. From humor to love to rage, Clifton's poems elicit a visceral response." This landmark volume will be a must-have for all of Lucille Clifton's fans, past, present, and future. It is sure to be the most talked-about poetry collection of 2012.
G) To Keep Love Blurry by Craig Morgan Teicher
To Keep Love Blurry is about the charged and troubled spaces between intimately connected people--husbands and wives, parents and children, writers and readers. These poems, many in traditional forms, including sonnets villanelles and long poems, as well as two poetic prose pieces, trace how a son becomes a husband and then a father. They act out against “woe that is in marriage,” a phrase Robert Lowell famously used as the title of a sonnet, but they also revel in marital passion. Lowell is a constant figure throughout the book, which borrows its four-part structure from that poet’s seminal Life Studies. Following Lowell’s example, Teicher meditates on the relationship between truth and art, between what happens and what’s depicted, on the thrill and danger of passing off half-truths as facts, and the surprising truths that lies reveal. This collection probes a life that longs to be recast as poetry, and poems that long to leap into the lives of their subjects.
H) Theophobia by Bruce Beasley
Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia is the latest volume in his ongoing spiritual meditation which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. Theophobia is structured around a series of poems called “Pilgrim’s Deviations” and forms a deviant and deviating pilgrimage through early twenty-first century science, history, politics, and popular culture. The book forms a kind of postmodern paradoxography—an ancient literary form that consists of lists of astonishments and wonders in the natural and human worlds, compilations of the marvelous, the inexplicable, the ominous, and the bizarre.
I) Passwords Primeval: 20 Poets in Their Own Words by Tony Leuzzi
Passwords Primeval: 20 Poets in Their Own Words contains discussions in contemporary poetry from the artists who have helped shape, but not confine, the qualities with which we associate the scene today.The discussions in Passwords Primeval: 20 Poets in Their Own Words illuminate these poets and their poems in such a way that one may access valuable insights into their work without the work losing any of its magic or mystery. Contemporary American Poetry is a vast, evolving entity that does not cohere in some neat, manageable form. Passwords Primeval does not pretend to fully represent the diversity of poetry written by Americans in the last 40 years. Nonetheless, a front-to-back reading of the book will demonstrate an astonishing interconnectedness, as if each voice echoes another from opposite ends of the same canyon.
J) Diadem by Marosa Di Giorgio, translated by Adam Giannelli
Marosa di Giorgio has one of the most distinct and recognizable voices in Latin American poetry. Her surreal and fablelike prose poems invite comparison to Kafka, Cortázar, or even contemporary American poets Russell Edson and Charles Simic, but di Giorgio’s voice, imagery, and themes—childhood, the Uruguayan countryside, a perception of the sacred—are her own. Diadem, a careful selection of poems that spans the enormous output of her career, helps to further introduce English-language readers to this vibrant and original voice.
