BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_1327" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Aracelis Girmay, BOA poet"][/caption] Kingdom Animalia, a collection of poetry by Aracelis Girmay, was chosen as the August selection for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club.  Camille T. Dungy reviewed Girmay's collection explaining why Kingdom Animalia is an excellent choice for this month's book. Dungy found Kingdom Animalia to be an invigorating work that "maps the world in which we live, classifying us, grouping us, reminding us of what sets us apart, and what ties us together."  The collection itself succeeds in demonstrating, examining, and revealing relationships.  The relationships that Girmay address range from people to animals,...

WBEZ 91.5 featured a review of Adam McOmber's short story collection, This New & Poisonous Air.  The review speaks highly of McOmber's work and his ability to blend "myths, fairy tales, and fables" into beautiful and intriguing stories.  McOmber uses a varied palette of time and history to create fresh and innovative characters, events, and pictures. These "intricate and provocative stories" are at once distinct and yet unified in their "timeless" quality.  McOmber has succeeded in creating a collection that is "laced with sorrow and mystery, beauty and compassion, insight and protest."  Further, "This New & Poisonous Air is exquisitely...

Two of BOA's recent stars, Nikola Madzirov and the inimitable team of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep, were recently featured in the Bloomsbury Review, a bimonthly "book magazine" devoted to sharing the best contemporary literature. "Our mission," they write, "is to seek out those quality books that are underserved and undeservedly overlooked by other media—bringing you reviews of books from large publishers that don’t receive the promotional budget of their bestsellers, and new books from small, regional, nonprofit, independent, and university presses you won’t discover elsewhere." Besides this, the Bloomsbury Review is "simply lively writing about good reading and great...

In a recent review of G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher's Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, blogger C. Moniz at California Poetics highlights the glittering electricity of their words, finding that "[t]he lines could stand on their own without the reader having to know a single detail about 'the performance,' which could be any number of life’s glittering spectacles." Moniz references the poem "A Short History of Friendship," saying, "The power of these lines is intensified by the dismissive tone of 'just' and 'anyway.' ... The downplay of these phenomena—a luminescent insect, a celestial body, a shard of geologic...

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher's collection Your Father on the Train of Ghosts has been hailed before as the seamless product of a collaboration which, rather than producing a host of call-and-response or exquisite corpse poems, comes through with a third, somewhat different voice than either poet alone. In Newcity Lit's recent review of the book (and it's hard to call it just a book), however, the interlacing of American Life as subject matter with this new voice is also examined. Tackling "an undeniably complicated, expansive subject," Waldrep and Gallaher's poems "slip fluidly from topic to topic, from the interior...