BOA Blog

Jillian Weise, author of The Book of Goodbyes (BOA, 2013), was presented with her 2013 James Laughlin Award at the Academy of American Poets' Prizes Ceremony on Friday, October 25. Library Journal calls Weise's new collection "edgy" and "in-your face." Reading from her collection at the ceremony, Weise "slyly delivered ache and anger in poems about breaking up and about overhearing two people mocking her at a cafe." Commenting on the event as a whole, Library Journal says,"As amply proved by the 2013 Academy of American Poets' Prizes Ceremony... contemporary poetry is not the sealed-off playground it's sometimes thought to...

HTML Giant is calling Diadem (BOA, 2012) "a collage of images ranging from the surreal to the innocent and childlike." The collection, with poems by Marosa di Giorgio, translated from the Spanish by Adam Giannelli, "paints surrealistic and beautiful pictures of culture, childhood, sexuality, and death." "...these poems could be read as a novel, cover to cover, or on their own as individual pieces, and they would still have the same power and depth. The poems themselves blend and blur the lines between each other, in effect recreating an idea of recalling memories of the past; sometimes fantasy, sometimes all too...

Publishers Weekly has announced its "Best Books of 2013," and Jillian Weise's new release The Book of Goodbyes is on the prestigious list for poetry. Winner of the 2013 James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets, and the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, The Book of Goodbyes has had a remarkable publication year. Publishers Weekly says of the collection, "These fierce, hip, heartbreaking love poems call out to a lover who can’t be lived with or without. They’re humorous, odd, and full of all the unreasonable truth of love. This book is the real thing." Jillian Weise was...

Congratulations to Aimee Parkison, author of The Innocent Party (BOA, 2012), on receiving a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Award for Literature. Parkison is among 15 from across the state to receive the 2013–2014 award in the categories of songwriting, composing and writing. "Joseph Dewey, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 2012) wrote, 'Parkison is a storyteller, conjuring characters who harbor festering secrets, lurid urgencies, and violent compulsions. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Parkison deftly works the caricatures of Southern Gothicism into terrifying clarity.'" According to the North Carolina Arts Council, "artists receive a fellowship to support creative development and...

The Georgia Review reviewer Judith Kitchen praises Bruce Beasley's "verbal pyrotechnics," as displayed in his recent collection Theophobia (BOA, 2012). "Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, [Beasley] breaks the line on 'humility,' thus placing it on the fulcrum between the all-powerful and the unassuming, the immortal and the mortal. Then, by situating genetic engineering alongside evolution, by suggesting a God made in the human image, by reducing the language of origination to nonsense, he fashions an equivalence between supplicant and creator; However, in doing so, he has almost unwittingly exposed his doubt to the same open questions." Kitchen notes Beasley's ability to question and analyze...