BOA Blog

Ryan Teitman invites readers to challenge assumptions in his collection Litany for the City. According to Anthony Rintala of Southern Indiana Review, "the simple, stubborn act of repetition narcotizes thought. The obsession endlessly mouthed loses all sense and the chant of prayer, strung together like beads, becomes an arrhythmia of consonant stops without connotation, cognition, or coherence—clacks of sound on a dumb ear.” He elaborates: "Poets have long dabbled with the effects of this semantic satiation, the temporary numbness to ear and mind of a familiar word or phrase repeated too often." This reconsideration of and re-construction of language is exactly what...

Ira Sadoff's True Faith revolves around the act of searching. In a collection which the speaker asks questions of his world - "neighbors, friends, the reader, and the gods" - storySouth Review calls Sadoff a searcher of "whatever he can get." Sadoff digs deeply at the meaning of human relationships with the world at large, and then digs deeper still. According to storySouth Reviewer Shawn Delgado, "These poems can be brief reflections or lengthy meditations. Some feel intimate and personal while others unleash a political fury." Throughout this collection are moments of intimate introspection and bold interaction with the world...

The fantastic Poets & Writers featured essay with Craig Morgan Teicher and his wife, poet Brenda Shaughnessy, is now live online! The piece is a remarkable window into the personal and creative lives of the married poets, with insights on how they met, fell in love, and currently thrive in the mix of marriage, parenthood, and poetry: "Finding a poet in New York City is like shooting fish in a barrel, but finding one who’s a kindred spirit, a romantic partner, and a writer you truly admire is more like landing Moby Dick in your third-floor Brooklyn walk-up. We probably...

BOA is proud to announce Barbara Jane Reyes as winner of the 2012 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry Published in 2010 for her BOA collection Diwata. According to Our Own Voice, "the monograph DIWATA will be part of the GFLA special collection (South East Asian Collection) in the Library of Congress and housed permanently in the Asian Reading Room." News of her award has appeared in The Philippine News and Asian Fortune, both newspapers with a nationwide U.S. circulation, as well as in other major Philippine news media and social networks. Born in Manila and raised in the San...

"A Rochester publisher - BOA Editions, Ltd. - can pride itself on being at the center of the poetry universe in 2012," says Jack Garner of Rochester, New York's own Democrat and Chronicle. "They've assembled the poetry of the greatest and most beloved poet among those they publish to create a book that is swiftly becoming an event - The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010." On the topic of worldwide adoration for Ms. Clifton and her poetry, Garner suggests that this love is "engendered by Clifton's large heart and richly inspired observations of family and all sorts of relationships...