BOA Blog

Adam McOmber, the author of BOA's This New and Poisonous Air, had a recent discussion with Time Out Chicago's Jonathan Messinger about the historical elements in his new book. Though all of the tales in his debut collection of short stories are steeped in the uncanny and the macabre, McOmber says that he is "really interested in using elements of the fantastic in a serious way, not the whimsical elements of the fantastic you see in some short stories." His draw to history is apparent as well, as in his stories "The Automatic Garden," and "There Are No Bodies Such...

Tara Betts reviewed Barbara Jane Reyes' poetry collection, Diwata, with hopeful and inspiring words.  Diwata, published by BOA Editions, mixes the creation narrative of Adam and Eve with traditional Filipino stories.  Her poetry features women with strength and agency who not only play a major role in creation narratives but are creators themselves.  The mythical creatures of Diwatas, Duyong, and Aswangs weave together a narrative of female empowerment and creativity.   Betts' review presents Reyes' collection as a beautiful tapestry of blessings and curses, blame and power.  She suggests that each female character "develops [Diwata] into a story of home...

[caption id="attachment_1352" align="alignleft" width="294" caption="Deborah Brown. BOA poet."][/caption] Deborah Brown's debut poetry collection entitled Walking the Dog's Shadow recieved an outstanding review from Rain Taxi Magazine.  Her work features poetry of memories and refections by a speaker who is "mature and wise."  The collection uses the concrete world to discover implicit realities in walking the shadow of a dog or losing the moon from the sky.  Brown's poety, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and published by BOA Editions, leads the reader off the road of familiarity into the creative and imaginative unfamilar. Rain Taxi Magazine commented that Brown's poety draws on careful refections and memories which become discussions of the abstract, absent and real. ...

Craig Morgan Teicher's Cradle Book recently received a glowing review from blogger Tracy K. Smith over at The Best American Poetry. Relating an episode from her own college days when one of her professors spent the first half hour of her first class of the term reading Italo Calvino's "The Parrot" aloud, Smith unearths the "large, strange order to which even we- in our post-post modern moment- are subject," and the inexorable draw to fables and folk tales which we all find in ourselves. "I think they speak to a place in us that is very similar to where poems...

In a rave review, BOA poet Christopher Kennedy's Ennui Prophet is called "a bastion of cool," and "at times the literary equivalent of an unnerving smirk." The reviewer, Michael Costello, is writing for the blog We Who Are About to Die, and heaps heavy praise on Kennedy's latest volume of prose poems, which is set to launch in less than a week. "These are the surreal scenarios of a propheteering mind awash in the weariness expressed by the title," the reviewer muses, then also crediting Kennedy with both "graphic power and verbal economy a la Hemingway, but with his own inventiveness."...