BOA Blog

Nickole Brown's Fanny Says was recently reviewed by Lambda Literary, as a recent collection that expresses "documentary impulses in contemporary poetry." "Fanny Says delights and dazzles at every turn," says reviewer Julie R. Enszer. "In these poems, Brown finds the space and time to explore her own family and the South as an imagined location. In the tradition of great lesbian writers such as Dorothy Allison, Fannie Flagg, June Arnold and Rita Mae Brown, Nickole Brown spins a yarn that is at once fantastical and believable, one that leaves us, as readers, yearning for more. . . . In these poems, she...

Two fantastic interviews with Robin McLean have surfaced recently, carrying provocative, fascinating discussions on her new fiction collection Reptile House. Likened to Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis for stories that are "satirical, ironic, and hilarious" with a "sarcastic subtext of who we are and how we are choosing to live," McLean discusses some of the book's surprises with the Nashville Review. "Look, we walk around, most of us, me included, and I think we’re each 'normal' and also 'weirdoes,'" she says. "We love stories and murder-ridden TV shows. We are bullied by bosses at the office, then turn...

In a new review, Julie Marie Wade of The Rumpus makes the case for why Nickole Brown's Fanny Says should be considered a contemporary epic poem. "Epic poems are long," says Wade. "They have a narrative arc, which presumably includes a hero and some significant events. And before poems were printed and read from a page, epics epitomized the value of oral tradition: preserving a people’s history and collective identity through a shared text that was memorized and passed down from one generation to the next. . . . Nickole Brown has written an epic poem called Fanny Says." "[Fanny Says]...

Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent collection of poetry, All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems, has received high praise from reviewer David Starkey of the Santa Barbara Independent. "Sean Thomas Dougherty’s 'New and Selected Poems' are chockablock with men and women down on their luck," says the review, "and he embraces them all, detailing their miseries and the small joys that make life almost bearable. 'You come to me wearing the rain,' Dougherty writes in 'Invocation,' 'swaying like a broken swing.'" For more than 20 years, Sean Thomas Dougherty has negotiated between modernist and avant-garde writing and more...

In a recent review in the Omaha World-Herald, Guadalupe Mier of the Omaha Public Library calls The Secret of Hoa Sen one of her favorite poetry books of 2015. "Poetry speaks to me, and I believe that it offers something for everyone, from the sublime to the nonsensical," says Mier. "[Nguyen Phan Que Mai] writes eloquently about family, femaleness and the sensual beauty of her country. When she writes of place, I feel that I am walking past the rice shoots in a long ago world." Nguyen Phan Que Mai is among the most exciting writers to emerge from post-war...