BOA Blog

Publishers Weekly is calling Que Mai's The Secret of Hoa Sen "straightforward, personal poems" that “lament and celebrate with the landscape—the smells, colors, and people of her country—that is their touchstone." The collection focuses on “the lingering physical and psychological effects of the Vietnam war,” but also turns its attention to the larger world, singing for "the alienated orphans of the Vietnam War; for garment workers in Bangladesh; for the victims of Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines; and for mothers across the globe in perilous circumstances." Even with such a scope of subjects, Que Mai writes with a "detail-oriented eye" that...

Erika Meitner’s poem "Porto, Portare, Portavi, Portatus" was recently featured in Poetry Society of America's column "In Their Own Words." Poems featured here are provided in full, with an ensuing commentary by the author. This poem is the last in Meitner’s newest collection Copia, and contains many of the elements that are featured throughout the collection as a whole: optimistic mid-century Detroit; vacant buildings as a symbolic understudy for bodies; and a peculiar feeling of longing, expressed through places waning in both health and atmosphere. Meitner gets personal about the poem and what inspired it, including the Latin verb porto from...

Lee Upton's The Tao of Humiliation has been named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2014! Called "masterful stories by a writer of great lyrical gifts" in a starred Kirkus review published earlier this year, "these 17 tales explore personal and familial relationships with both pathos and humor—and all are well worth reading." Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these 17 stories examine the course of humiliation, introducing us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a...

We are thrilled to announce that Marsha de la O is the winner of BOA Editions' Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, Antidote for Night! Antidote for Night will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2015, within the American Poets Continuum Series. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited; there is no formal submission process for this award. Poet, actress, and Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry, and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt...

In honor of Veterans Day, we want to thank those who have bravely served our country with a poem from Hugh Martin's The Stick Soldiers (BOA, 2013). The War Was Good, Thank You —In the college cafeteria, a freshman girl asks, So, how was the war? 1. We live in small steel hooches shaped like boxcars. We fill bags with sand and sweat to pile beside us. Our rifles collect dust when we sleep. Our rifles collect dust when we fire them. 2. In Jalula, I stood in the turret, hands on the Fifty. I looked over mud walls and...