BOA Blog

Gather 'round readers, BOA poet Wyn Cooper has been featured on Slate.com this week! The website has posted Cooper's poem, "Movement," along with an audio clip of him reading it. This is a real treat considering that his poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, CrazyHorse, and more than 75 other magazines. The man can write! So click here and check it out, come back, post a comment, and tell us what you think! Also, Cooper has recently released a collection of sonnets, Chaos is the New Calm, which you should also check out by clicking here

Should you find yourself in Syracuse, NY this Friday (Feb 3, 2012), you should definitely check out BOA poet Janice Harrington's reading at the YMCA's Downtown Writer's Center! Janice Harrington's first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions as well as the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, which was also published by BOA Editions, came out in 2011. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship...

At the beginning of Mike Walker's review of The Hands of Strangers by Janice  Harrington, a Boa Editions publication, Walker  acknowledges the difficulty an artist might encounter his attempts to render the voices of a marginalized people clearly, without suffering arrivals at heavy-handedness and cliche. Walker writes, "If you are going to entitle a poem 'Old Photos' in a book dedicated to life in the nursing home, you'd better be a true master with words and also be able to conjure a tale alive in very fast time," a challenge to which "Harrington rises...time and time again." An exploration of...

Forget the OSCARS; the 2011 National Book Critics Award is the prize worth watching out for, especially since Aracelis Girmay's sophomore collection of poems Kingdom Animalia, published by BOA Editions, has been nominated in the category for poetry.  The award "honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism and literature." The National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, which is elected annually,  nominates five authors for each category including autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Past winners in the category of poetry include CD Wright, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Louise Glück. This year's winners will...

This week at the Rumpus, poetry editor Brian Spears speaks with Barbara Jane Reyes on oral poetry, creation myths, Avatar, and getting paid. Particularly interesting points include discussion on balancing the perpetuation of formal boundaries in poetry with the integrity of traditional Filipino culture, as well as the fetishization of native cultures in art and literature. If you have yet to read Reyes' newest book of poems Diwata, published by BOA Editions in 2010, this interview will surely have you visiting the BOA bookstore to order your own copy. Additionally,  you can find further insights embedded within the interview from...