BOA Blog

According to Hayden's Ferry Review, The Innocent Party by Aimee Parkison is irresistible. Her writing is of unique experience that transcends the categorization of imaginative realism, while still doing it a lot of justice. The plot of her short story "Locked Doors" is as captivating as they come: the story is from a man's point of view, whose sister shatters emotionally into three personalities. The review comments on Parkison's characters, unforgettable and walking the line between reality and unreality through familiar and comforting narrative. Another story from The Innocent Party in the review's spotlight is " Murder on the Pasture." The...

This month in Publishers Weekly, Craig Morgan Teicher's upcoming (and highly anticipated) poetry collection To Keep Love Blurry, out on September 11, was featured. Teicher, a young writer, has already published two previous works (including Cradle Book) and is also poetry editor and director of digital operations at PW. The review praises To Keep Love Blurry, saying that it "risks most everything poetry can risk."  Robert Lowell, the famous poet (often considered a father of the craft), is a familiar inspiration for Teicher, and is ever present in much of his new book. Through his poems, "the spirits of dead...

Have you ever wondered what exactly goes on in the minds of your favorite authors? What do they think about, dream about, glean inspiration from? What do they surround themselves with for insight and motivation? In a series of posts on the 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Aimee Parkison (author of BOA's spring 2012 release The Innocent Party), discusses writing, inspiration, and all that goes into producing a book like The Innocent Party. Parkison confesses she gets most of her ideas just before or as she falls asleep. "Strange and beautiful things" are revealed to her...

Aleš Šteger's The Book of Things, translated by Brian Henry and published by BOA in 2010, is the winner of the AATSEEL's 2011 Award for Best Literary Translation into English! Šteger's poems in The Book of Things were originally written in Slovenian, and were translated into English as a part of BOA's Lannan Translations Series. The AATSEEL praised Brian Henry for his "outstanding" translation of a poet who is "not as well-known in this country as he should be." As indicated in the book's title, the poems explore a wide range of objects and "things" at their beginnings, which lead...

Having received heaps of praise since its publication, Aracelis Girmay's Kingdom Animalia is a focus of interest once more, in the May 2012 issue of Gently Read Literature: Reviews of Contemporary Poetry & Literary Fiction. Reviewer Michelle Ovalle singles out Girmay's poem "This Morning the Small Bird Brought a Message From the Other Side," pulling from it two powerful lines she believes sum up the book as a whole: "I want to know what to do / with the dead things we carry." In a compelling and astute interpretation of the lines, Ovalle reminds us that Girmay's "dead things" are...