BOA Blog

[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...

[caption id="attachment_1017" align="alignnone" width="252" caption="This New & Poisonous Air. Stories by Adam McOmber."][/caption] In his debut short story collection This New and Poisonous Air, Adam McOmber brings the influence of Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, and Edgar Allen Poe to the next generation in stories that are a blend of the fantastic and the macabre.  The book, a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, explores in dense, richly written stories the nature of fantasy and the obsessions that too often drive them. Recently profiled in Time-Out Chicago, McOmber is also the author of the upcoming novel Empyrean. His debut novel details the story of...

Over a year-long period, poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep exchanged poems through emails, sometimes at a furious pace. Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is the culmination of these exchanges, and represents one of the most engaging and expansive collaborative projects, a collection that Bin Ramke refers to as being "Powerful and elegant."  What emerged from these poems was not a voice that either could say belonged wholly to Gallaher or Waldrep, but a third mysterious voice. Gallaher and Waldrep return to that experience in a series of conversations to discuss the process of writing the poems. In...