BOA Blog

The Academy of American Poets continues to praise Jillian Weise's The Book of Goodbyes, after announcing her win of the 2013 James Laughlin Award last week. Brenda Shaughnessy, previous Laughlin Award winner, and one of the judges for this year's award, speaks highly of Weise's second book of poetry: "Jillian Weise's crackling second collection is called The Book of Goodbyes—that's 'Goodbyes' plural. For it turns out there are so very many ways to say it. This is no ordinary see ya later/maybe next life, no firm and clear Dear John letter, though epistolary laments and last words pierce the reader as...

Jim Daniels' new collection Birth Marks receives even more praise, in a piece by Coal Hill Review, the online imprint of Autumn House Press. Regarding Daniels' writing of such urban landscapes as Detroit and Pittsburgh, reviewer Mike Walker is impressed with the poet's ability to set his own stage: "It would not, I need to stress, be a 'scene' if Daniels didn’t take it there, but he does and much to his credit: there are numerous ways of writing about places like Detroit—a city begging to have as much written of it as possible—and Daniels picked this trajectory that takes...

BOA poet Adrie Kusserow (Refuge, 2013) will join a team of American writers on a reading tour to Sudan this October, as part of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Each year, in partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, the International Writing Program "organizes reading tours to a country/region with a relatively sparse history of literary liaisons with the contemporary United States." Through public readings and cultural excursions on the tours, important and well-established American writers are connected to "new and distinct literary-cultural landscapes," while international colleagues and students are...

"Properly Speaking, Marosa di Giorgio's poetry was never 'lost' in English, because it never made it into English in the first place. Two recent collections in translation remedy this oversight, which in retrospect seems remarkable. We didn't know we'd missed her," says G.C. Waldrep of The Kenyon Review.  One of these editions, Diadem: Selected Poems (BOA, 2012), translated from the Spanish by Adam Giannelli, is a "more generous selection from across di Giorgio's oeuvre," according to the review. "At their most basic, di Giorgio’s lyrics are vignettes drawn from childhood and burnished with a parabolic mysticism that aligns them with...

Lauren Hilger of Green Mountains Review compares Adrie Kusserow's Refuge (BOA, 2013) to the works of Langston Hughes and Anne Sexton. Poems like Kusserow's "'War Metaphysics for a Sudanese Girl' ...suggest the cadence and construct of Langston Hughes' 'Harlem,'" while poems like "Skull Trees, South Sudan" are "delivered with Anne Sexton tartness." "Kusserow presents her awareness and self-consciousness to the reader. She often writes the familiar as alien ... This collection grips the reader with jaggedness, inequality, horror, and the tenderness of nursing one's children. A Vermont mother watches her son and daughter play in the stream having seen a Sudanese woman...