BOA Blog

BOA Editions is very happy to announce that Hey Small Press! has selected two of our books for their November list.  For those unfamiliar with Hey Small Press!, it is are a relatively new non-profit that does the good work of promoting independent publishers to public libraries around the United States.  From the Hey Small Press! website: "We are Hey Small Press!, a non-profit project promoting independent publishers to public libraries all over the United States. Founded by current and former public library employees, we exist to encourage libraries to acquire small and independent press books. We love good books...

The story of how Your Father on the Train of Ghosts was conceived by two esteemed poets, emailing back and forth pieces of poems, has become, for some, as interesting as the poems themselves. However, as Mike Walker of Coal Hill explains in his review, “the proof of the pudding must be in the eating, not in the size of the kitchen, the name of the chef, or anything else.” At first, Walker admits, he “wondered how well the innovative concept of shared writing of poetry via email would work out” and even feared that the Waldrep he’d “come to...

Mike Walker of Coal Hill Review argues that while the subject matter of Naomi Shihab Nye’s Transfer is a common topic of discussion, Nye somehow manages to make her collection of poems the most intimate conversation in the room. In Transfer, Nye draws on her Palestinian-American heritage without ever getting swallowed up by the current state of politics, or even just our expectations of the Middle East as Americans. Walker explains that as Americans, we are fully aware of the Middle East and the questions at hand, “but too often we get the same images over and over again, and...

This year, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Creative Writing Fellowships in poetry. We're proud to say that four BOA authors were included among the 2011 recipients; Richard Foerster, Aracelis Girmay, Christopher Kennedy, and Celcilia Woloch. The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic...

(BOA Author Adam McOmber) In his review of Adam McOmber’s “This New and Poisonous Air,” Gabriel Blackwell of HTMLgiant.com, focuses on what it means to impart our selves on to empty vessels of our own creation. Blackwell argues that works of art do not wholly exist without our understanding of the artist. “When we make reference to the ‘Mona Lisa,’” Blackwell explains, “It is only rarely as a stand-in for its namesake, Lisa del Giocondo. It is the artist we want to speak of, the portraitist rather than his subject, for he is what we see in the portrait, not...