BOA Blog

According to a rave Mantis review, Birth Marks is "the ideal of hipness," "the best of mixed tapes," and "cool ... Like the Detroit and Pittsburgh, baseball and Black Sabbath and road trips the book contains. Cool like Jim Daniels." The review notes Daniels' ability to combine humor with "the elegantly understated" in his fourteenth poetry collection, comparing the poet to the likes of Frank O'Hara and the Black Mountain poets. "Sitting down to read Birth Marks is a bit like drinking a high-protein smoothie made from O'Hara's breath, Creeley's observational skills, and Springsteen's wisdom; in short: it is Daniels...

Big news from the weekend for The Tao of Humiliation! The New York Times Book Review featured Lee Upton's new fiction collection on its Sunday Shortlist, calling the stories "long, erudite, warmhearted and capable, brimming with scholarship and knowledge." According to the review, "Readers will want to live inside this wonderful book — not just in its parties and wrecked gatherings and sophisticated conversations but in the sentences themselves, which are genuine shelters ... In its own way, each sentence is a container filled with something revelatory." Just released in May, The Tao of Humiliation is alternately chilling, funny, devastating,...

In a review that regards Jim Daniels' Birth Marks as an expression of "the loss of the authenticity we experienced during our youth," Heavy Feather Review analyzes the recurring motifs of authenticity and alienation in the recent poetry collection. "Employing his masterful control of language, Daniels' new book suggests that, much as we may be 'marked' during our youth by the imperfections of a dissolute society, from our subsequent perspective as adults, we may view our often flawed coming-of-age experiences as the most authentic ones of our lives." The review calls the poems "very amusing," and speculates that the "profound...

A new "Weekender" review by West Virginia's The Journal says Dariusz Sosnicki's new Polish translation The World Shared is "destined to become an international classic." Translated by Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk, the bilingual English/Polish collection is celebrated for its use of "contemporary issues such as global warming, urban life, and advances in technology" to explore the human condition. "One of Poland's foremost poets... Sosnicki is a fearless and tenacious intellectual whose poetry exhibits flashes of brilliance that illuminate our most obscure and often unacknowledged fears about contemporary life. He is also a cynic who knows how to hope. As such,...

According to American Microreviews and Interviews,  Hugh Martin's debut collection of contemporary war poetry "joins a growing field of contemporary war poetry that includes Brian Turner, Seth Brady Tucker, and others. The Stick Soldiers gives readers a broad sense of his experience in basic training, deployment, combat, and return to civilian life." Selected by Cornelius Eady as winner of the A. Poulin, Poetry Prize, Martin "helps establish the point that like any soldier, there are prewar and postwar moments, too." Reviewer Mark Allen Jenkins claims that much of the collection's strength comes from Martin's exploration of the relationships between soldiers,...