BOA Blog

"Though the poet is three years dead, her shiny, sly, red-lipped brown face looks up at me in the morning from her book jacket by my bed. Her smile undresses all my foolishness. Her name is Lucille Clifton, and if this were a wiser country, it would be known even to school children." Reviewer Robert Hirschfield asserts this praise and more in a heartfelt Matador Network | Travel Culture Worldwide review of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. In his piece, "Traveling with poet Lucille Clifton in her afterlife," Hirschfield says he reads the "Collected Clifton" almost religiously. "Clifton’s poems...

Publishers Weekly is calling BOA's forthcoming Spring 2013 translation Light and Heavy Things a “moving and timely glimpse into contemporary Pakistani literature.” “Plainspoken and image-driven, Sahil’s poems rarely break a page but offer complex portraits of contemporary Pakistani life in which nature, city, war, and human emotion all entwine with the quotidian,” says the review. "At times the poems seem driven by personal longing: 'I stared out the window./ Dreams built their nests in my eyes,/ and the cage was empty.' At others, their force can be of the collective and political kind: 'Always in the city/ on our way...

Photo courtesy of Hugh Martin and The New York Times BOA poet and Iraq war veteran Hugh Martin recently shared with The New York Times blog “At War: Notes From the Front Lines” his insights, deep emotions, and fears from his war experiences before deploying overseas. Martin's NYT piece, “Longing for the Test of War as a Young Man,” chronicles his time in the Army National Guard reserve, a six-year commitment he signed up for just three months before the 9/11/01 attacks, and his journey from Basic Training to that which he had never anticipated before: deployment. "The war began for...

A thorough and comprehensive Bookforum review of Craig Morgan Teicher's newest book To Keep Love Blurry finds through the poems a character we can "know and believe." In a complex and lovely exploration of the book's Confessional poetry, reviewer Hannah Brooks-Motl ties Teicher and his new book to two of "mid-century American poetry's big-name Roberts": Robert Lowell and Robert Creeley. "Like Lowell," says the review, "Teicher meticulously probes the intersections of writing poetry and living life. He can be lacerating, as was Lowell, in his depiction of himself as a father and husband. But Teicher's poems also obsessively chart a kind of...

Image courtesy of www.poets.org. National Poetry Month is just days away(!), and BOA is getting ready to celebrate by participating in a Buy One/Give One promotion during the entire month of April. How does it work? For every book of poetry you purchase through the BOA Bookstore this month, BOA will "gift" a free book of poetry to the recipient of your choice! The goal is to put more poetry into more hands, especially for those who don't ordinarily read poetry. Purchase a book of poetry through the BOA Bookstore this National Poetry Month, and we'll contact you via email...