BOA Blog

Image courtesy of The New York Times Book Review | 5 May 2013 Beloved poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Li-Young Lee have been garnering big attention in recent media. In last Sunday's The New York Times Book Review, American poet and critic Robert Bly lists both Naomi Shihab Nye and Li-Young Lee as two of his "favorite poets of all time." Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of BOA titles Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You and Yours (2005), and Transfer (2011); Li-Young Lee is the author of BOA titles Rose (1986), The City in Which I Love You (1990), Book...

BOA poet Ryan Teitman, author of the recent Litany for the City (2012), has his poem "Archipelago" featured as a Read Selection for the new issue of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. We thought we'd share it with you. Congratulations, Ryan! Archipelago Ryan Teitman A bird is a kind of island. In flight, a flock is called an archipelago. At rest, a peninsula. When two flocks meet, they are called a communion. Used in a sentence: Two flocks met and became a communion. A surgeon opens a body with a scalpel. A scalpel is a kind...

Ira Sadoff’s True Faith (BOA, 2012) is both "provocative and mature,” according to Gently Read Literature. The collection wrestles with notions of “god, country, and self,” and it is through explorations of these themes that Sadoff becomes a “skilled craftsman, imparting his vision—and his questions—in perfectly sculpted bursts of powerful language.” True Faith openly admits to a negative, sometimes “derisive” tone, but not without purpose. In an attempt to “reach the core of the human mind and heart,” Sadoff interrogates "ideas of faith," juxtaposes a “young man’s innocence” with a “naïve and sleeping America,” boldly exposes our “inability to communicate...

As we close the chapter on this year’s National Poetry Month, Kazim Ali shares a few words about poetry’s importance in everyday life, and reads his poem “Ocean Street” on NPR's Weekend Edition. Likening poetry to the human body, Ali says: “The line of poetry teaches us about the length of breath, and the way energy moves through a poem teaches us about the way breath and blood move through the human body.” In other words, poetry is a way of living. Ali is the author of The Fortieth Day (BOA, 2008), and co-translator of BOA's forthcoming Iranian translation The...

Rain Taxi Review of Books is calling Bruce Beasley's Theophobia "inventive," an "important contemporary addition to poetic wrestling with the religious," compared with the works of Augustine. Among other praises, reviewer Spencer Dew marvels at the creative manner by which Beasley addresses the divine while simultaneously speaking to such topics and objects as Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite of the feline digestive tract, or a TiVo Customer Service telephone line. How does he do it? "[Beasley] manages to keep the reader connected by stitching such abstract and conceptual musings to the recognizable and known. Voicemail messages warning of call volume, popups...