BOA Blog

Mike Walker of Coal Hill Review offers remarkable praise for The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, commending both BOA and Ms. Clifton on the vision for this landmark volume and what it is all about. "Looking at this book as I removed it from its packaging, it was clear that BOA pulled out all the stops on this one, producing a beautiful volume that even has the now-rare bookmark ribbon one used to encounter more often in high-quality books, especially those on some sort of mission... BOA’s offerings are always exacting, pithy, and urgent books of poetry and short...

Most people know Richard Foerster as a poet whose BOA books include Trillium (1998), Double Going (2002), and The Burning of Troy (2006). However a look inside most any BOA book on your shelf would reveal Richard Foerster as the typesetter behind BOA's beautiful finished collections. To use a rock-n-roll analogy, Richard is "the fifth Beatle" at BOA - a typesetter and proofreader extraordinaire who makes sure our books are as beautiful looking as the poems are beautiful to read. Richard recently gave an extensive interview with Connotation Press about his life and poetry. His responses revealed his perspective on...

A new review of The Folding Star and Other Poems by Jacek Gutorow featured in Stride Magazine, begins with an excerpt from a letter in which Gutorow reveals his concerns about poetry in translation: "There is something paradoxical about the effects created by poetry in translation. The poets who are deeply immersed in their native language, who are capable of articulating complex meanings connected with innumerable modulations of colloquial speech, and who manage to sound out the unique frequencies of their languages by experimenting with etymology or phraseology, are usually poorly served by translators whose technical abilities may be splendid...

Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Blogs honors the late writer Louis Simpson not only for his craft, but also for his personal life which inspired it. Astley reflects deeply on Mr. Simpson's life, praising him infinitely for the identity struggles he endured during his lifetime. Born in Jamaica, Simpson felt himself to be an outsider as he moved to and navigated through the U.S. Astley describes Simpson's poems in The Owner of the House as being "informed by a melancholy clear-sightedness, a generous, wry sense of humour, and a determination to celebrate the true lives and capacities of ordinary people. If Chekhov...

Publishers Weekly has honored yet another of BOA's Fall 2012 titles with a *Starred* Review - this time, for Tony Leuzzi's Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words. "Poet and professor, Leuzzi brings questing intelligence and a practitioner’s empathy to this collection of interviews with 20 poets who are diverse in terms of aesthetic allegiance, generation, and practice." The review notes the breadth, not only of the number of prominent poets interviewed in the new book, but of the topics discussed and insights pulled from even the most unexpected of sources. "The range of topics proves that poetry...