BOA Blog

Publishers Weekly recently announced its list of the best new titles being published this spring.  Out of the 6,000 titles submitted, ten were chosen for each genre.  In what is called, "a strong season for poetry," G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher's new collaboration Your Father on the Train of Ghosts found its way into the top-ten list of spring poetry. Reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher, who refers to Waldrep and Gallaher as "two rising poetic stars," writes, "The result of the collaboration sounds like neither of their poetic voices; rather, it's a weird third voice you'll want to get to know."  Read Publishers Weekly's full list here...

Calling Cradle Book "among the year's most innovative work," Danniel Schoonebeek reviews Craig Morgan Teicher's latest book of poems as both imaginative and unsettling.  Schoonebeek compares Teicher to several other American poets who are "breaking the boundaries of contemporary form to establish new aesthetic frontiers."  He writes that while Cradle Book stems from traditional folklore, Teicher creates his own new form.  "Teicher's is a speaker, who like a god, likes to dictate the terms of his universe, of his story, by speaking them into existence.  In fact, Teicher's speaker is not a speaker at all - he is a storyteller."   Read the full review here The Rumpus.net

The Fall 2010 issue of Pluma Fronteriza, a newsletter of Chicano(a) and Latino(a) writers of the El Paso and Cd. Juarez Border Region, features this review of Ray Gonzalez's newest prose poetry collection, Cool Auditor:    "Fusing the real with the surreal and the natural world with human relationships, Gonzalez creates his own brand of magical realism.  Gonzalez also brings pop humor in such poems as "The Guitars," which uses the word "guitar" in almost every sentence to talk about the true (and not so true) lives of rock stars.  David Lazar notes, 'Ray Gonzalez may be our most essential prose poet.'"...

With our upcoming workshop in poetry inspired by sports and athleticism in mind: Baseball and Writing Marianne Moore Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go or what you will do; generating excitement-- a fever in the victim-- pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter. Victim in what category? Owlman watching from the press box? To whom does it apply? Who is excited? Might it be I? It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel-- a catcher's, as, with cruel puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly back to plate. (His spring...

In the latest publication of The Hollins Critic, Lynnell Edwards offers her response to Cecilia Woloch's most recent book Carpathia.  Edwards writes that Woloch beautifully explores the notion of "place," a theme that is increasingly being studied by journals, panels, and universities.   "Cecilia Woloch's most recent book of poetry, Carpathia (2009) as well as her first four books spring chiefly from this complex understanding of place as both emotional and historical geography, and it is a theme that informs the trajectory of her five volumes of poetry."    Read an excert from the review here The Hollins Critic