BOA is proud to announce that Bone Symphony by Michelle Phuong Ho of New Haven, Connecticut has been selected as the Blessing the Boats Selection by 2024 Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Bone Symphony will be published in the fall of 2026. Bone Symphony mines the wreckage left by centuries of colonialism and imperialist warfare in Vietnam and reassembles the bones—testimonies from re-education camps, classifieds written by former boat people, toxic residue left by Agent Orange, a poem written from one side of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, memories inherited from elders, drawings by the author, and more.
Michelle Phuong Ho is a poet with work in Black Warrior Review, Nat Brut, Poetry, Volume, and elsewhere, and is the recipient of the 2024 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Poetry, the 2024 BRINK Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing, and the 2020 Frontier Poetry Industry Prize. Born to Vietnamese refugees, she received her MFA in poetry from NYU. She lives in New Haven, CT, where she gathers writers and artists for workshops, readings, and meals.
On being selected for Blessing the Boats:
“I’m overjoyed that my first poetry collection will enter the world as a Blessing the Boats Selection. It’s an honor for the book to be chosen by Aracelis Girmay, whose writing has been a guiding light for my own work, and to join the incredible lineage of poets BOA has supported over the last 50 years.” —Michelle Phuong Ho
On Selecting Bone Symphony:
"Bone Symphony is a major work which carries into print more than I knew could be carried into print. I am startled, actually, by the immediacy of the voices here and the breathtaking ways that Michelle Phuong Ho works in language to contend with the ongoing catastrophes, as she describes it, of colonialism and imperialist war in Vietnam. Reckoning with what is unutterable, this poet makes a sound that swerves — unruled, capacious. I am breaking into something else to read these paths.” —Aracelis Girmay
Blessing the Boats Selections spotlights poetry collections by women of color and is named after Lucille Clifton’s National Book Award-winning collection, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems (BOA, 2000), in honor and celebration of her enduring legacy. Please visit our Blessing the Boats Selections page for more info.
Next Submission Period: July 1st - August 1st, 2025.
New 2025-2026 Editor-at-Large: Evie Shockley.
