BOA Blog

We are pleased to announce that Jillian Weise's The Book of Goodbyes is one of four poetry titles on the 2014 SIBA Book Awards Long List! According to the Southern Independent Booksellers Award, "each year, hundreds of booksellers across the South vote on their favorite 'handsell' books of the year. These are the 'southern' books they have most enjoyed selling to customers; the ones that they couldn't stop talking about. The SIBA Book Award was created to recognize great books of southern origin." The Long List, announced earlier this month, is a list of books that booksellers and their customers...

In a wonderfully unconventional piece on Ko Un's Flowers of a Moment (BOA, 2006), Dave Bonta of Via Negativa says, "Tonight, I don’t feel like pretending to be a book reviewer. (Does it really matter what I have to say about a guy who’s been nominated so many times for the Nobel Prize?) Tonight I would rather respond to a few of Ko Un's brief poems as if he were right here, sharing drinks and conversation." Bonta continues, attempting an intimate "conversation" in verse with selections from Flowers of a Moment. Here are a few conversation excerpts we especially enjoy:...

BOA translation The Oasis of Now is featured on the Little Star Weekly blog! The Iranian translation carries poems from the late Sohrab Sepehri, translated from the Persian by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati. Sepehri lived his life as a poet and a painter. The review notes: "In the mid-sixties he resigned a government position and traveled extensively in China, Japan, and India, developing a deep interest in Buddhism and Hindu philosophy, and devoting himself thereafter  to painting and poetry. This encounter with eastern meditative traditions converged in his work with an affinity for mystical Sufism." "He followed Nima Youshij, Ahmad Shamlou,...

According to Publishers Weekly, Geffrey Davis' debut collection Revising the Storm is "an account of selfhood, origin, and meaning in the face of an absent father and broken relationships." His collection, stocked full of memories, is a search for meaning and repair. "Throughout its three sections, the engine powering the collection runs on retrospection and introspection, and a fierce questioner, challenging the accuracy of the observations, is always at the wheel." Writing about such topics as childhood, a drug-addicted father, familial love, and self reflection, Davis speaks on a personal level. "Acutely aware of myriad meanings to each assertion and...

Recently, poet Michael Dennis featured new BOA translation The World Shared on his blog as the book of the day. "Reading Dariusz Sosnicki is a bit like Vladimir Mayakovsky running into Wislawa Szymborska on a train, they sit down with the patient Raymond Carver and start to hack out poems," he writes. "These melancholy poems read a little like fables, a little like common knowledge." The World Shared, a bilingual Polish-English collection by Dariusz Sosnicki, translated by Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk, carries a "thoroughly modern voice," but also an "echo of old Europe singing background serenades." At times, the...