BOA Blog

Jim Daniels' new collection Birth Marks (BOA, Sept. 2013) is "an unflinching look at urban life through poetry," according to a press release by Carnegie Mellon University, where Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English. "In ... Birth Marks, Daniels captures the gritty culture of working-class urban life. He uses the 39 poems to take readers on a tour of post-industrial Detroit and Pittsburgh to tell the tales of cities and their residents who came out swinging when the economy collapsed around them." The release quotes Daniels: "I have always been interested in ordinary people in ordinary circumstances and...

A Publishers Weekly *Starred* Review is calling Jillian Weise's new collection The Book of Goodbyes (BOA, Sept. 2013) "...a smart and savvy ode to absences—of a lover, of a self, and of a part of the self, literal and figurative." The review ruminates on the structure of the book--with its "acts," a middle Intermission and a Curtain Call ending--and on Weise, as she writes "brilliantly" about being marked a "disabled" poet. "Intermission’s whimsical, hip fables star anthropomorphic finches, and the Curtain Call’s 'Elegy for Zahra Baker'—a philosophical tract on absence, presence, and pain—brilliantly examines the case of a missing person,...

Portrait of Ira Sadoff 20"x16" oil on canvas 2011, Michael Hafftka In a recent piece on The Huffington Post (online), painter Michael Hafftka and BOA poet Ira Sadoff (True Faith, 2012) ruminate, each on the other's respective arts. Featured in the piece is a painted portrait of Sadoff, by Hafftka, which is part of a series of  portraits the artist has created with poets as subjects. "I love poetry with its mysterious use of words, bending, creating, smearing words to reveal emotions hidden or apparent," says Hafftka. "Over the past 35 years and as part of my fascination with poetry, I have painted poets,...

"Monster," by Polish poet Dariusz Sosnicki was published in the July 29 issue of The New Yorker. The poem--about a train carrying children away from their parents for a summer vacation, as it transforms into a ravenous monster--comes from BOA's forthcoming spring 2014 translation The World Shared, by Sosnicki and translated by Piotr Florczyk and Boris Dralyuk. MONSTER  The train, which I took back across the great plain, I tell you, it was a monster with a swollen belly. It had a lair in Pulawy, ravened in Warsaw; children greeted it and it swallowed them. Now they’re playing together— the...

Following a lyrical account of meditations gleaned from her experience producing wine, an art she compares to the craft of poetry, Katrina Roberts of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) savors Refuge (BOA, 2013) by Adrie Kusserow. “Writing poetry, like growing grapes, requires a particular attentiveness and faith," says Roberts, "a strange perseverance in the face of dismissal or anonymity, a marriage to patience with no promise of fruitfulness.” Roberts writes for the LARB poetry column "Tasting Notes," through which she offers "...mere sips, to whet the appetites of those who have not already discovered the poetic riches ......