BOA Blog

At it again, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 is on Ms. Magazine's list of 2012's Best Books of Poetry by Women! "Just two years after her death, this 769-page collection is a welcome anthology, representative of more than 40 years of Clifton’s writing. If you’re not yet familiar with Clifton’s incredible mix of the familial and the political, this is one book you need right now." See Ms. Magazine's full list, here. Don't have your copy of The Collected Poems of  Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, yet? Get it here.

Double Room Journal is calling Marosa di Giorgio a poet with a “quiet, lyrical voice” in her new 2012 collection Diadem: Selected Poems, with English translations from the Spanish by Adam Giannelli. According to the review, the collection is full of “earthy celebrations of pastoral Uruguay and semi-surreal moments of magical realism” within a “bucolic landscape that evokes both the nostalgic innocence of childhood and the disturbing thresholds of sexual awareness.” di Giorgio's poems, compared with the works of Kafka, Pizarnik, and Cortázar, “possess the sort of allegorical dimensions one finds in myth and fable.” Purchase a copy of Diadem,...

Congratulations to Barton Sutter for being featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry! Sutter's "A Little Shiver" from The Reindeer Camps (BOA, 2012) is an ideal selection for the winter season, and according to Kooser, a poet like Barton Sutter "knows all about cold and snow." A Little Shiver After the news, the forecaster crowed With excitement about his bad tidings: Eighteen inches of snow! Take cover! A little shiver ran through the community. Children abandoned their homework. Who cared about the hypotenuse now? The snowplow driver laid out his long johns. The old couple, who'd...

If you were to wonder what contemporary Polish poetry is like today, Gently Read Literature would hand you The Folding Star and Other Poems (BOA, 2012), with Polish poems by Jacek Gutorow and their English tranlsations by Piotr Florczyk. "From Marcin Bielski and Jan Kochanowski to the Polish poets of today," says a review by Gently Read Literature, "the ability of poetry to deal with nearly any topic and to especially tell little stories encapsulated in a few lines has long been a tradition of the Poles and an area of literature where they've displayed exceptional expertise. Gutorow has placed...

Todd McCarty of Gently Read Literature applauds Ryan Teitman for being a poet able to "communicate...at the right pace, allowing [his poems] to arise, unfold, then pass away," ultimately giving "power" to his new collection Litany for the City (BOA, 2012). Though the book's title may initially make us consider "city" as a "singular, organized unit," Teitman's "vision of the metropolis shifts and evolves in unexpected ways" and "explores the mutable boundaries of place and perception." According to McCarty, "person and location impact one another" in this new collection, creating a "geography of shifting experience." Also praised in this review...