BOA Blog

Fred Shaw of Pittsburgh City Paper is calling Jim Daniels' new poetry collection Birth Marks (BOA, 2013) "clear-sighted about the past, without nostalgia." According to the review, Daniels "seems most interested  in keeping memories of places (and their inhabitants) alive with a worldly reverence,"  as evidenced through the poet's choice of speaker: "a faithful son/friend and realist, unafraid to point out his own faults and others'. This, paired with the grittiness of his surroundings, makes the collection stand out." By setting his poems in such urban landscapes as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Oakland, all places which have heavily influenced the poet, they...

According to an Inside Higher Ed review, Aurelie Sheehan's Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA, 2013) is more than just a collection of typical memories turned stories, and is compared in some ways to Hemingway's brief fictions. "Micro-fictions, flash-memoirs, prose poems, incidents, anecdotes, extended metaphors-there's no differentiation on the book's part, nor is there much need, as most of the pieces are glittering little truths whether factual or not," says the review. Jewelry Box, comprised of "58 delightful, tiny stories" is a collection of intimate renderings of the life that surrounds us, just under the surface. Sheehan's writing captures, and...

Seth Abramson of the Huffington Post is calling Jillian Weise's The Book of Goodbyes (BOA, 2013) "unflinching and profoundly relevant poetry ... a take on alienation that implicitly indicts all of us." According to the review, Weise's new collection is one that "helps teach us how to live better ... not by positing the poet's effusions as normative but by seizing upon so many of the strangenesses we live in and through." Weise... is at her best when her verse is least adorned ... Her romantic poems are, given their inspiration, suitably frustrated, urgent, and compassionate..." She does well to balance...

Douglas Watson stuns critics with his debut collection The Era of Not Quite (BOA, 2013). In a rave HTML GIANT review, Tessa Mellas calls the book "absurdity, hilarity, heady contemplation, and killer prose," which offers "deaths galore." "Deaths stack up, morbidity becoming its own joke as nihilism loops back on itself again and again." Like other reviewers before, HTML GIANT likens Watson to Beckett, Calvino, and this time, Barthelme as well, as he "adds his unique voice to postmodernism." "With playful experimentation and linguistic prowess, Watson mocks the conventions of fiction, making us wonder what stories really are for in...