BOA Blog

Erika Meitner's poem "Outside the Abandoned Packard Plant," from her recent BOA book Copia, was featured in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The poem was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the newly relaunched magazine's poem of the week. According to the feature, "There is a driving rhythm in this poem — the industry of crickets, the forward motion of the lines — even as there is no man-made machinery at work in the defunct auto plant. The contrast between the two heightens the tension between what is lost and the image, in the last line, of...

We are pleased to announce that BOA poet Aracelis Girmay (Kingdom Animalia) has just won a 2015 Whiting Award for poetry! 2015 marks the 30th anniversary of these prestigious $50,000 awards given each year to ten exceptional emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry. In the case of Aracelis Girmay, the published work the judges read was Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011). Santa Ana-born Girmay (who now splits her time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and New York) is one of the ten 2015 recipients, all of whom were honored on March 5, 2015 at a ceremony at the New York Historical Society in...

This week, BOA Publisher Peter Conners served as a judge for the regional Poetry Out Loud competition held at SUNY Brockport. The competition winners were Demetria Hale of The Harley School and Nichola Metzger of Brighton High School. They were awarded with BOA books and advanced to the state finals, to take place March 9 in Syracuse, New York. The Poetry Out Loud program encourages and enables the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation. BOA gives three cheers for all of these brave and talented teens and applauds their love of poetry!

Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse recently selected Robert Thomas' Bridge as its "staff pick," calling it a book bound to keep "the reader on edge even beyond the last page." Bridge explores "'infinite what ifs'" through the eyes of protagonist Alice. According to the review, "If you’re not stunned by the language of this poet’s novel, you will be by the plot, a monologue of suspense and grief; or by the narrator, the painfully smart and self-aware Alice." Click here to see the full piece by Politics and Prose. Robert Thomas' Bridge is available at the BOA Bookstore.

A recent review from RALPH [The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities] explores the difference between "poets" and "Poets" while reflecting on Erika Meitner's ability to connect poetry to readers. According to the review, "poet poets write lines that end-stop, occasionally use rhyme and rhythm and symmetry and a weird wrong metaphor to convey their stuff. But it is stuff (and nonsense) and you know they Just Don't Have It." "You want stuff that talks the life out of you into you, the salt-mine we call life which ain't out there, it's in here. Where we've been all...