BOA Blog

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is calling Jim Daniels' new collection Birth Marks "the essential handbook into the goings-on in author Jim Daniels' life ... Between dark humor and unwholesome love, the poet gives us an unblinking view of the alcoholism in his family, the struggles of the working class and the shame he has felt surrounding it all." Reviewer Daeja Baker writes, "Mr. Daniels is trying to find himself in this mess of Michigan memories, searching his own adolescence, crouching in the 'sin pits' of his past, longing for his words to fill him with the 'familiar Detroit way' once again."...

Librarian turned author and creative writing professor, Janice Harrington was recently featured by The News-Gazette of Central Illinois with a fun Q&A: "A few of my favorite things: Janice Harrington." Harrington, the author of BOA titles The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011), and Even the Hollow My Body Made Has Gone (2007), "is known for her elegant poems on serious topics, which have been featured in America's leading journals ... [She] added to her lengthy list of honors recently, when the Illinois Reading Council chose her new children's book for its 2014 'Illinois Reads' initiative." Here's...

According to a new Rain Taxi review of Douglas Watson's The Era of Not Quite, "Watson’s fabulist fictions make us laugh at ourselves, our incomplete longings, and irrational fears ... With a wicked humor and a sense of the absurd somewhere between Beckett and George Saunders, Watson makes us laugh while pointing out the irrationality of our desires." Winner of the inaugural BOA Short Fiction Prize, The Era of Not Quite explores the realm of futility in life. While depicting individual characters' struggles, these stories simultaneously zoom the perspective out to larger realities. According to reviewer Peter Grandbois, "The shift...

The results are in! Devin Becker is the winner of the thirteenth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for his collection Shame | Shame. The collection was selected from nearly 500 manuscript submissions by renowned poet David St. John. Devin Becker will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in spring 2015. Of the collection, David St. John says, “Devin Becker’s Shame | Shame is a brilliant debut collection. Here, the prose poem has been re-imagined as a cinematic vignette, yet rooted as deeply in the American Northwest as anything in Richard Hugo and David Lynch....

"A love of life mixed with a keen sense of its brevity, a scintillating appreciation that simultaneously sees the skull grinning at the banquet, the fly crawling among the perfect flowers." These are words used by World Literature Today to describe Fleda Brown's new collection No Need of Sympathy. According to reviewer Fred Dings, "Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one’s life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to...