BOA Blog

Erika Meitner’s Copia “uncovers richness of meaning in plain American language,” according to a recent review by Rain Taxi Review of Books. The review notes Meitner’s focus on how “common objects and signage become mediums for recovering history and personal memory” in the face of decaying landscapes that are both barren and overabundant, from the aisles of Walmart to the city of Detroit. Meitner is the guide through such "barren surfaces" as American suburbs and cities, and emphasizes that “'The truth is / even cities / are ephemeral.'” What becomes important in the face of decay is recovering the stories...

The Los Angeles Review is calling Geffrey Davis’ Revising the Storm “a compelling story through verse," capable of making readers “stop for far longer than punctuation warrants in order to fully appreciate a single couplet.” "Revising the Storm reverberates with the voice of a young man emerging from a boyhood plagued by hunger, loneliness, and pain into a new life as a man who finds peace in reconciling with the past. The cyclical passage of life, love, and responsibility from father to son is measured in its varying degrees." In these poems, readers come to see the development of the...

In a recent Late Night Library interview by Joanna Kenyon, author Lee Upton talks about her new short story collection, The Tao of Humiliation, as well as her use of humiliation as a shot at redemption, literary epiphany, the body, and why we take so many selfies. “It’s as if humiliation teaches us how to be human among other humans," says Lee, "—that is, humiliation can teach us a humbling awareness of our flaws. Our idealized self is crushed in a moment of humiliation—as if humiliation is a ‘way’ of sorts, a way toward or through experience, a kind of...

Erika Meitner’s new book Copia was chosen for the September Rumpus Poetry Book Club! In the essay that kicked off the month-long discussion for the virtual reading group, Camille Dungy responds to the question “Why I Chose Erika Meitner’s Copia for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club” with a barrage of ‘because’: “because this book is written with the attentive eye of an unrequited lover,” “because there is hope amidst the dissolution,” “because that’s how life looks sometimes,” and most notably, because “the poems in Copia are poems we need right now.” Why are they poems we need right now? According...

A recent Miramar review is calling Fleda Brown’s No Need of Sympathy “ambitious … the work of a mature and retrospective poet.” In No Need of Sympathy, Brown concerns herself with poetry’s current position in the cultural landscape. She rounds off the collection with a sequence of conventional, personal poems. If a poet can be said to have a thesis, Brown's would be in her collection’s second poem, "The Purpose of Poetry." According to reviewer Elizabeth Dodd, poetry is “perhaps in a bit of a mid-career crisis, surprised by the many challenges and changes time keeps working on us.” But...