BOA Blog

Greetings! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner. Diaspora I am riding the F train to Brooklyn with my son, who is Appalachian as much as anything, who is six and does not notice the Hasidic women reading Tehilim on their way home, praying psalms from worn leather- bound siddurim, moving their lips past Broadway, Second Avenue, Delancey, and he would not know to identify them by their below- the-knee skirts, the filled in parts of...

Greetings! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Rail by Kai Carlson-Wee. Listen to a recording of this week's poem on SoundCloud. Pike Somewhere in her heart she remembers the sound of lake water hitting the boat. The low back-and-forth of buoyed weight working to hold up the bodies inside. Her father removing a worm from the loose earth, threading the wet pink flesh with a hook. Dirt on his fingers. The long, bleeding body in agony, curling to feel its way up...

Greetings! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes. Garden This is the story I was told: she doesn’t remember when the yellow housewas new, when the backyard, formerly a farmer’s plot, was a mess of thornsand weeds. She doesn’t remember when the fi rst rains fell in autumn, whenthe weeds grew a grown-up’s waist high. She doesn’t remember how the soilwas so rich, how the worms were so juicy, wriggling, and fat. She doesn’tremember how the...

Greetings! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem in honor of Pride Month is from Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Gesture and Pursuit I want to be the bride days later when she is no longer a bride, combing her hair in the mirror. But it is too late. I've already locked myself in my room and imagined every variation between witness and music. I want everything to touch me before it is bright enough to slip through the house undetected— like the sound...

By popular demand, the BOA Poem of the Week has returned! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem was selected by Intern Noah M. from Sean Thomas Dougherty's The Second O of Sorrow. Biography of LeBron as Ohio When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Barakaon the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff,more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince.How back in those drunken days when I stillran in bars & played schoolyard ball&...