BOA Blog

 We asked our Spring 2023 authors to share about a food or drink to enjoy while reading their book, or one that appears often in their new collection from BOA. Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of the poetry collection Flare, Corona, and below, she shares a little back story and a cocktail that pairs well with her poems. Cheers, and happy reading! from Jeannine Hall Gailey: This layered libation is a variation on a pomegranate martini, a cocktail that has the orange, pink, and red colors identified with solar flares and eclipses, and the ginger syrup and pop rocks give the drink a...

We asked our Spring 2023 authors to share about a food or drink to enjoy while reading their book, or one that appears often in their new collection from BOA. Mahtem Shiferraw is the author of the poetry collection Nomenclatures of Invisibility, and below, she shares a little back story and a food that pairs well with her poems.  from Mahtem Shiferraw:   When I think of Nomenclatures, the food that comes to mind is "kategna" or, ቃተኛ in Amharic, which is not ordinarily an everyday food. It's mostly made of fresh enjera; at the end of the process of making a batch of enjera, the last one is...

Mahtem Shiferraw is the author of Nomenclatures of Invisibility, as well as the author of poetry collections Fuschia,Your Body Is War, and Behind Walls & Glass. Through a personal, historical, and political lens, Shiferraw's Nomenclatures of Invisibility attends to the collective experiences inherited through deeply-rooted ancestry, tracing patterns of movement and migration, sorrow and invisibility, and the resulting complicated notions of home. In the following self-interview with Mahtem Shiferraw, learn more about the author's thoughts around naming, immigration, and making space for our fellow humans! How does one think about nomenclatures? What’s in a name, that is not seen right away?  A name contains a world. A world filled...

Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl, as well as Savage Pageant (Birds LLC). In these hybrid poems, Stark explores her mother’s fraught immigration to the United States from Vietnam at the end of war through the lens of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Interspersed throughout are a series of collaged photographs, featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes. In the following interview with Jessica Q. Stark and BOA's new Director of Development & Publicity Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer, learn more about the author's thoughts around working with archival materials, writing hybrid texts, and retelling personal histories through...

There’s a lot of moving between past & present in this book, and a lot of talking to or talking for things that can’t talk back (a “younger self,” “Sweet fears,” etc.) What role do you see those voices playing in this collection? I wrote about this a bit (about my poem “Reader, I Married Him”) for Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words” series… one of the hardest things for me, sometimes, is to extend compassion to my past self, to that younger version of me I usually think of as incredibly foolish, or preoccupied with all the wrong things, especially things I...