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BOA books make NPR's 2016 Preview

 

 

 

 

NPR included two BOA books— Karen Volkman’s Whereso and Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria—in its highly-anticipated 2016 Poetry Preview!

The list, entitled "In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See," features eight new books in total, focusing on the light that can be found in poetry during dark and trying times. The preview notes how each poet and new book will bring this light to readers in 2016.

On Whereso: "Karen Volkman's poems are inscrutable at first. They demand effort, but when examined these poems reveal depths teeming with microscopic life. After her previous two books, Spar, a seminal collection of love poems in prose, and Nomina, a sequence of nonsense sonnets, Volkman has relaxed mostly into free verse in which she can describe 'false content, / the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door,' and other vagaries of the heart. She may be elliptical and strange, but make no mistake, she is a master, able to get inside the mind of a dancer's body . . . and transport the willing reader into the deepest folds of true attention."

On The Black Maria: "Crowned by an extraordinary long poem interweaving the childhood of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose neighbor 'turns, / with her white looking, / his telescope into a gun' with the author's hopes for her own unborn child — 'Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars' – Aracelis Girmay's third book of poetry looks at the crimes committed against African Americans throughout history and now. In sequences, untitled lyrics, long poems, and a series of 'Estrangements,' Girmay follows the deepest roots of her language to their sources: 'It is my history raiding me,' she writes. These poems repeat themselves, reuse lines, feel anxious and scattershot, but there is beauty and imperative witness everywhere here."

Both collections are available for pre-order now at the BOA Bookstore. Get your copies months ahead of publication dates by ordering with BOA! To celebrate BOA's 40th anniversary year, we're offering 40% off all BOA Bookstore orders through January. Use promo code BOATURNS40 at checkout to save!
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