BOA Blog

Happy Halloween from BOA! Here's some spooky verse by Michael Waters, from his collection Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems, to get your spine tingling: Morpho In his Journey to the Jade Sea, "one of the world’s greatest walkers," John Hillaby, tells the story of the ebony child raped and strangled near an acacia tree in the bush in Kenya. The game warden who found her was mesmerized by two large, blue-green, rarely seen butterflies trembling upon her glazed, staring eyes, opening and closing their wings. Those butterflies were attracted to moisture, lapping with their spiked, black tongues the shallow lagoons of...

A new Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books essay by Christopher Kempf discusses the art of war poetry, looking to five "critically-regarded books of poetry by veterans" which have been "released by distinguished presses": Hugh Martin's The Stick Soldiers (BOA, 2013); Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise by Brian Turner; Bangalore by Kerry James Evans; and Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers. According to Kempf, we can better understand, "through poetry, 'the causes and the crimes'" of conflict." He adds, "the relationship between war and its poetic representation is also one of poetry's newest, most pressing problems, particularly...

Michael Teig's latest poetry collection, There's a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick, has recently gotten the attention of American Microreviews and Interviews. “As a means of interrogation, a book of poems can pose one or several questions … some questions are meant to drift in the background, unanswered, while others storm to the forefront, demanding replies.” Michael Teig’s poems, according to AMRI reviewer Laurie Young, contain both. And, though attempting universal questions, and addressing themes as common and central as “the domestic, the environmental, and the animal,” his poems interrogate in a way that’s unique....

  With “long, loose conversational lines” and a speaker "less concerned with results and technical prowess than the process of speaking (and living) itself,” John Gallaher’s In a Landscape is something of an “extended monologue,” according to a new Publishers Weekly review. The book-length poem, which has received much positive attention from the poetry world, "chronicles the questions, profundities, and crises of midlife, marriage, and fatherhood.” PW says: "Childhood stories (from the time of Gallaher’s adoption and adolescence), provide a backbone for the poem, and round out a history of adversity, uncertainty, and ever-shifting identity." "Gallaher’s charm and wit, and...

The praises keep rolling in for The Tao of Humiliation! Lee Upton’s newest fiction collection, and winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, received a new Library Journal *starred* review. "This story collection by poet, novelist, and critic Upton takes its title from one of several winningly off-kilter stories set at a motivational rural retreat aimed toward breaking down the ego as a precursor to building it up." But it’s the pieces themselves, and their tellers, that are particularly notable. According to the review, the stories "proceed by indirection, with elements that cohere only after the fact and open up...