BOA Blog

author photo courtesy of blog.pshares.org In a recent interview that goes straight to the heart, Wendy Mnookin (author of What He Took, The Moon Makes its Own Plea, and To Get Here, etc.) and Patricia Caspers of Ploughshares Literary Magazine, are bound by a unique and unfortunate commonality: both of their fathers were killed in car accidents. Caspers says she first came to this realization when hearing Mnookin read her poetry at AWP, and while the details and circumstances surrounding their fathers' deaths are very different, they both share a similar (ongoing and insatiable) impulse to reflect on, analyze, and...

photo courtesy of loft.org Anyone in or heading out to the Midwest this weekend? Your leading "must-go-to" event is a sensational reading by three-time Minnesota Book Award winner and BOA poet Barton Sutter, a FREE event open to the public, as he shares from his new book The Reindeer Camps and Other Poems. The Reindeer Camps has been said to "restore your faith in the drumbeat of your own heart" by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and has been called by the late Bill Holm "unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before." There to compliment the readings of Sutter's...

BOA writer Ira Sadoff is once again in the Publishers Weekly spotlight, for his new (eighth) collection, True Faith. PW praises Sadoff's acute self-awareness and observations of others, as he inspects the "world's imperfections until he reaches something spiritual.. ." Sadoff's connection to the core essence of humanity -- the wordless, "unsayable" parts-- is what pushes his readers to what PW calls "a white-hot place" where Sadoff explores "“our fevers, those hungers/ that have no words around them, no illustrations." His poems display an undeniable paradox between the frustration of longing for an explained identity, and the pleasure of utter...

The Boston Review recently took notice of BOA book Your Father on the Train of Ghosts by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher. The book was also just named a finalist for the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for poetry. The review is especially drawn to the book's intriguing use of the second person perspective, and speculates on whom exactly the "you" is addressing: the poem's speaker, the population at large, or "someone on the other end of the line"? It calls the poetry "an example of contemporary work that struggles to express the exhaustion of excess," but its ability to do...

Naomi Shihab Nye, called "one of the most spirited voices in American poetry" by The Philadelphia Inquirer, is consistently in the headlines for her newest collection of poetry, Transfer. While she has been best known for her poetry collections Fuel, You and Yours,  and an extensive list of other writings, The Philadelphia Inquirer calls Transfer (published by BOA in 2011) "her most powerful to date." Reviewer Thomas Devaney calls the collection an ongoing elegy, which draws on her Palestinian-American heritage to "[chart] three central journeys: the journey of her father’s life in exile in America, the journey of his death,...