BOA Blog

In their Spring 2011 issue, the Review of Contemporary Fiction featured BOA author Anne Germanacos's collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, published Fall 2010. The reviewer notes that each story within the collection consciously collects "small yet luminous moments into some larger mosaic." Germanacos's prose is lauded for "the sharp glimmer" which each mosaic-like story possesses, further lending "an entire universe of meaning" to each individual tale. Among other praise for the book was the following: "Germanacos's evocative prose delivers precise and lasting images in a series of vignettes, each carefully crafted with a minimalist's patience...

The literary blog We Who Are About to Die not only sports one of the best titles in lit blogdom, but they have good taste too. Witness this excerpt from Michael Costello's review of Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy: "Not only is Ennui Prophet a bastion of cool, it is a true pleasure of craft and originality. Christopher Kennedy writes a world at turns emotionally haunting, descriptively vibrant,  and at times the literary equivalent of an unnerving smirk. There is an uneasiness about and an anxious thread stitching together line to line, poem to poem. These are the surreal scenarios of a...

[caption id="attachment_1205" align="aligncenter" width="200" caption="Ennui Prophet, prose poems by Christopher Kennedy"][/caption]   Ennui Prophet, the forthcoming collection of prose poetry by BOA Editions poet Christopher Kennedy, puts its emphasis on experiencing the written word itself, according to poet and critic Kenny Tanemura, of the Sycamore Review. Kennedy's prose poetry is marked by motion-- according to Tanemura, his shorter poems are "fluid," "dexetrous," and "graceful." He also says: "Left-handed guitarists, a swarm of bees, a Buddhist monk, Rasputin, Cantonese, and the F.B.I. all make cameo appearances in this collection, both in and out of context. This approach is not unlike a...

Jeanne Beaumont's Burning of the Three Fires recently earned respectable praise, courtesy of Coal Hill Review. Her poems are called curious for a few reasons: "First, Beaumont is alert to various and sometimes obscure aspects of the world: arcane information from Wikipedia, art, etymologies, fairy tales told slant, slasher movies, magician's tricks.  Then, the poems are curious in the older sense: subtly, carefully, and skillfully worked." The reviewer seems particularly fond of Beaumont's subtlety, of her ability to manipulate the tone "with such a light touch," which left the reviewer feeling "the kind of twist someone can give when she...

University of Rochester's Three Percent took a look at Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things and bestowed equal praise on the author and translator Brian Henry alike.  Henry is commended for matching the sophistication of Šteger’s writing in his translation, particularly in his replications of "tone and sound play of the Slovenian originals." The sophistication of translation is also remarkable given the "complex layering" that "is characteristic of Šteger’s poems."  The review also praises Šteger for his "dry, observant humor" and his imagery, both "dark" and "descriptive." "It's one of the best collections of poetry in translation in recent memory,"...