BOA Blog

Today's "Poem-A-Day" from the Academy of American Poets is "For My Grandmother's Perfume, Norell," by Nickole Brown. The poem is from Brown's forthcoming collection Fanny Says, out by BOA in 2015. We are so looking forward to putting this collection in your hands -- enjoy the sneak peek from the Academy! Click here to read the poem. About the Poem: "'For My Grandmother's Perfume, Norell' is a poem from Fanny Says, a book to be published by BOA Editions in the spring of 2015. All of the poems in this collection circle around my grandmother, Frances Lee Cox, an unforgettable...

Each year during the Rochester International Jazz Festival, BOA Editions collaborates with the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (RoCo) to bring Rochesterians and festival-goers a night of literature, jazz, and art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smx0eKd2KEA Literature (poetry) and jazz have long walked hand-in-hand, so, naturally, we at BOA do our part to infuse the spirit of the Rochester International Jazz Festival with verse. This year marked our fifth “Poetry is Jazz” event, hosted at RoCo during its 6x6x2013 exhibit, the “international small art phenomenon.” Our featured BOA author was Douglas Watson, whose new debut fiction collection The Era of Not Quite was just released...

We are thrilled to announce that PEN American Center has chosen BOA's recent translation Diadem: Selected Poems by Marosa di Giorgio, translated from the Spanish by Adam Giannelli, for the Shortlist of the PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation! For more than 50 years, the PEN Literary Awards, from PEN American Center, have honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature across such diverse fields as fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, translation, and drama. “We are proud that PEN’s Literary Awards are the most comprehensive in the country,” said PEN Executive Director, Suzanne...

Michael Waters' Gospel Night (BOA, 2011) has received recent attention and much praise from Poetry International. “In lines that are often metrically formal," says reviewer Michael Broek, "there is often a quite wild range of emotion, from the overtly sexual to the politically conscious, the plaintively domestic to the brashly cosmopolitan. This is highly energized verse, ‘Gospel Night’ suggesting the confluence of the putatively sacred with all that happens ‘at night’ – nightmares, porn movies, ghosts of dead heroes rising.” Much of the review focuses on the controlled structure of Waters' poems, contrasted with the content: “The book opens with a...

Among this country's oldest and most prestigious magazines is The Nation, which recently reviewed The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. Paired down, the review by Jordan Davis is a perfect guide to Clifton as an "exceptional poet." "What’s essential to know about the poetry of Lucille Clifton—what likely scared her about her writing, and what I don’t think anyone says about it—is that when she is good, she kills," says Davis while quoting her poem "at least we killed the roaches." The review moves steadily through the 770+ page collection, from book to book and poem to poem throughout...