BOA Blog

Congratulations to Ira Sadoff for being chosen as today's Featured Poet on Poetry Daily! Poetry Daily is an anthology of contemporary poetry that features outstanding works each day from new books, magazines, and journals. Featured are "the most eminent poets" as well as those lesser known. Each poem is selected for its "literary quality," to provide readers with a "window on a very broad range of poetry offered annually by publishers large and small." Two of Sadoff's poems, "Lament" and "Ex-Wives," both from his newly released collection True Faith, are today's features. Read them for yourself: Lament While I was...

This week, Michael Waters will demonstrate the versatility and universality of poetry, giving poetry readings in Bucharest, Romania (July 24) and Brasov, Romania (July 27). Waters, who has published ten collections of poetry, including five from BOA, has a deep connection to Romania, where many of his poems are set. In a recent article in The Prague Post (The Czech Republic's English-language newspaper), Stephan Delbos notes the qualities that make Water's art so appealing and innovative: "[Waters]..has been quietly writing some of the best poetry in the United States for the past three decades... Waters' work has moved steadily toward...

[caption id="attachment_1868" align="alignleft" width="165" caption="True Faith, released in April 2012"][/caption] In a recent review in Bangor Daily News, Dana Wilde described Ira Sadoff's new collection, True Faith, as a worthy contribution to the tradition of confessional literature that has emerged and flourished since the 1960s. True Faith, Wilde writes, is “an entry in that persistent flow” of autobiographical introspective literature by the likes of such artists as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and John Ashbery. According to Wilde, the complexity of Sadoff's work lies in the way the poems "surf idiosyncratically in and out of the waves...

Ko Un's Flowers of a Moment is currently being featured in the Summer 2012 issue of Ceries Press, in an essay by Melissa Kwasny entitled "The Flower Artist." In her essay, Kwasny explores the nature and identity of the flower in and as art, referencing a diverse canon of floral study that includes Charles Baudelaire, the German mystic poet Novalis, Morris Graves, Piet Mondrian, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and BOA's own poets Ko Un and Adonis. Kwasny describes how the flower is a conduit and reflection of human experiences, acting as a point through which we both access and view what Baudelaire...

Ira Sadoff is already receiving sparkling reviews for his recent True Faith, just released this past spring! In "That's Where My God Is: A Review of True Faith," Anne Webster of The Chattahoochee Review has called Sadoff's collection "an unflinching exploration of himself and his life," specifically referring to his relationship with faith, mortality, disillusionment, and "the search for meaning." Webster goes on to describe the work's three sections, which move from Sadoff's childhood past and the factors that influenced his addressing of religion, to exploration of major events in his spiritual life, to "present-day influences and his resulting skepticism"...