BOA Blog

Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly named Copia a Book of the Week in its weekly list of PW Picks! This honor places Erika Meitner in such company as novelists Joseph O'Neill and Ian McEwan, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and documentarian Ken Burns, among other writers chosen for the list. Click here to see the entire list of PW Picks: Books of the Week. Click here to read the Publishers Weekly starred review of Copia. To order Copia, visit the BOA Bookstore.

In a new review of No Need of Sympathy by the poet Lynn Domina, Fleda Brown is praised as a  “skilled poet, [whose] skill is perhaps most evident in the fact that she wears it so lightly.” Throughout the review, Domina discusses how Brown manages to mesh the technical structure of formal poetry with her own conceits, and to work with a unique plasticity of metaphor while carrying an air of nonchalance. "All poems, I’m told, are love poems in one way or another," says Domina. "And the object of all love poems is really the language in which it’s...

In a new Entropy review, poet Anthony Seidman calls Dariusz Sosnicki's The World Shared an "excellent translation into English from the Polish," which is “marked by the tone of the ‘public poet’ … able to speak of social concerns, of communities, [of] epochs." "Sosnicki has loads of talent, and this volume offers North American readers entry into his necessary poetry." The epoch The World Shared introduces readers to is “lurching in the muck of crass consumerism, Google instead of the library, subpar hip-hop, and a ‘disastrous geopolitical situation.’” While the world Sosnicki captures is called “Audenesque,” these poems are concerned with incidents of...

In an interview by Lookout for its "House Guest" series, fiction author Douglas Watson (The Era of Not Quite, 2013) talks about his brief relationship with philosophy, and explains how fiction may be working for him as its substitute. "I don’t know that much about philosophy," says Watson, "but that doesn’t stop me from poking fun at philosophers in my fiction. Really, though, it’s my younger self I’m making fun of." Watson, who fell out of love with philosophy in Philosophy 101, says: “Philosophy, it turned out, was difficult and rather dry and quite possibly beside the point.” An urgent...

A new Publishers Weekly *starred* review is calling Robert Thomas' Bridge a series of “linguistic tours de force,” full of “crisp, concise, emotionally explosive riffs ... that together form an unsettling character study." "You’d pass her on the street and never notice Alice, who works in the word-processing department of a San Francisco law firm by day, and attends the opera, watches movies, or, home alone, listens to the voices in her head during off-hours. Alice leads her lonely life in what she calls the 'Goldilocks Zone': not too crazy, not too sane—a just-right (if tenuous) balance between calm and...