BOA Blog

Adam McOmber admits he's been an ardent fan of the macabre and horror genre since high school. His own writing reflects the exquisitely unhiemlich, "the fantastic moments when the strange breaks through our daily grind." In a recent interview with the New School's LIT writer Mike Gillis, McOmber talks about his passion for the mythology and the fiction like his This New and Poisonous Air and the upcoming Empyrean. "I think that these type of stories- stories of the fantastic- reach back to mythology. Because that's what myths are," he said in a phone interview. "I think humans in general...

[caption id="attachment_1206" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, poems by G.C. Waldrep & John Gallaher"][/caption] Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third “voice” emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.  In Part 5 of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep’s engaging discussion about the ircollaborative process, the pair continue...

[caption id="attachment_1015" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Your Father on the Train of Ghosts. Poems by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher."][/caption] John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep continue their candid and insightful discussion about the process of writing the poems for their collaborative book Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.  Written over a year, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep exchanged emails almost exclusively in the form of poems.  In this next part of the conversation, the two discuss the nature of address found in the poem, the use of the "You,"  the role of community in poetry, and the mysterious, haunting nature of...

[caption id="attachment_1015" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Your Father on the Train of Ghosts. Poems by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher."][/caption] After exchanging poems via email at a sometimes furious rate for a year, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep were left with the task of turning this abundance of poems into a more manageable manuscript.  In part three of a six part series, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep return to discuss the collaborative effort involved in shaping Your Father on the Train of Ghosts into a cohesive collection that remained true to the spirit of writing the poems. You can read earlier parts...

[caption id="attachment_1015" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Your Father on the Train of Ghosts. Poems by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher."][/caption] Don’t Answer the Door (or Do) In this second of six part series, poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep continue to explore their experience writing Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, the product of a year-long exchange of poems via email, discussing the interior life of the poems and the collaborative nature of their book, a collection that John Ashbery referred to as one where the pair write within "a growing region, but there are others too, regions/ and examples of...