BOA Blog

In a piece she wrote for The Story Prize blog, Aurelie Sheehan (Jewelry Box, Fall 2013) "parses the strange relationship between truth and fiction in storytelling." Early on in her writing career, Sheehan experienced the common tension between truth and fiction in storytelling, especially with the "write what you know" advice she received in college. She realized, over time, that she was consistently trying to mask the origin of her ideas, characters, and other "inspirations" gleaned from reality and lived experience. "In my new book of stories, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories, I wanted to work with this edge,...

Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati's new translation of Sohrab Sepehri's poetry, The Oasis of Now, was recently reviewed by Mira Rosenthal for The American Poetry Review.   Rosenthal admits that reading poetry-in-translation is sometimes like "being at a wedding as someone's date" -- uncertain and with the potential for incredible social awkwardness. She also says, however, that a translator who makes clear their own connection and position on the poetry can mitigate that awkwardness, leaving readers free to sit back and enjoy the poetry. According to Rosenthal, Ali quickly establishes this connection in the book's Introduction. "Ali is clearly struck...

Newpages is calling Michael Teig's second poetry collection, There's a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick, "a romping book, full of syntactic (and synaptic) leaps." According to the recent review, Teig's news poems "hint at a diverse poetic lineage, possibly including James Tate, the New York School poets, and Sombrero Fallout-era Richard Brautigan." For poems that jump from "chickens" to "waltzes" to "hats," reviewer Elizabeth O'Brien calls the collection "confusing and exhilarating ... disorienting and enjoyable, and somehow utterly right." "...the poems in There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick are...

According to a recent The Rumpus review, Zeeshan Sahil's Pakistani translation, Light and Heavy Things, is a "thematically coherent, well-composed–albeit brief–collection that places Sahil right up there with the best of contemporary Pakistani poets, alongside folks like Hasina Gul, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Yasmeen Hameed." Commenting on the book's title, the review says, "... it's true that Sahil frequently juxtaposes the mundane and atrocious, the lighthearted and heartbreaking. Over the course of his unfortunately short life, Sahil witnessed multiple military coups marked by continuous, often violent political unrest. But the titular 'heavy' and 'light' refer as much to his home country's...

When it comes to The Stick Soldiers, reviewer Leilani Squire of Bookscover2cover cannot commend author Hugh Martin enough. "[The Stick Soldiers] is a brave, honest and authentic journey of a young man who served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and was deployed to Iraq in 2004. This collection of poems is not light reading but it is necessary reading if we are to heal the wounds of war and shorten the divide in our country. This is not about politics, but about poetry." Martin takes his readers to a place they've never been before,...