BOA Blog

BOA poet Barton Sutter is one of the select artists chosen for Duluth News Tribune's Best of Arts and Entertainment of 2012 list. Earlier in 2012, Sutter held a book release party for The Reindeer Camps (BOA, 2012), where he and his brother (The Sutter Brothers, a poetry-and-music duo) performed at the College of St. Scholastica. "He and his brother Ross performed... so instead of simply reading some poems (wonderful as they are) there was also music, sing-alongs, guest readings, and a lot of laughter... thoroughly entertaining." The article also briefly reviews Sutter's new collection The Reindeer Camps, calling it...

In a recent issue of the American Book Review, focused on Arab-American Literature, Naomi Shihab Nye's Transfer is called the "best work this much-honored poet has produced to date." Reviewer Norbert Hirschhorn acknowledges: "In much of Nye's earlier works... the poet's persona embraces sweetness, a witness to nature, and faith in the essential goodness of people," while also noting that Transfer tends to stray from that persona, embracing what Ted Hughes calls "the voice of pain." Nye's Transfer deals heavily with the difficult loss of her father, and the process of finding a dialogue with him even after his death. "The whole book...

In a recent review by Bucknell University's West Branch Wired, Ira Sadoff's True Faith is used as an example in a bold resistance against the "perceived 'smallness' of contemporary American poetry," and the idea of contemporary "kitchen-window poets" who "simply gaze out their kitchen windows and write what they see." Grouped together with several other elite poets and compared with the "old gods" of poetry, Sadoff is acknowledged as a poet writing "ambitious" poetry, "poems that visibly grapple with difficult subjects, and that often do so with language that cuts roughly to the bone." Reviewer Matthew Ladd finds the poems...

On a quest for renewed inspiration for writers in 2013, Sycamore Review is praising Tony Leuzzi's new collection of interviews Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words. As per David Blomenberg's acclaim, works like Passwords Primeval, which divulge what "other writers have found inspiring, helpful," can help fellow writers to rekindle new "energy toward their own work." Blomenberg applauds Leuzzi's fresh and lively take on interviewing: "With some interview collections, the questions can become somewhat repetitive, but Leuzzi, while touching on discussions of tone and image and revision (which are common enough), takes advantage of opportunities for the poets...

A recent review from the Kenyon Review (Online) is calling Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things a “smart, startling, and wildly pleasurable book.” Already a winner of Three Percent’s 2011 Best Translated Book Award as well as the AATSEL 2011 Best Literary Translation into English Award, reviewer Dan Rosenberg concurs that the collection should receive such merits. According to Rosenberg, part of the appeal in The Book of Things is the way Šteger “grants the non-human stuff of the world the same agency and importance of humanity; it insists on the souls of things.” Rosenberg also gives credit to Brian...