BOA Blog

Photos by William J. Ingalls   BOA's 16th annual Dine & Rhyme event opened Sunday September 29th with "This has been another unprecedented year," and this feeling of success continued throughout the night as over two-hundred people took their seats in the auditorium of the Memorial Art Gallery. Illuminated by a small light at center stage, award winning poet Li-Young Lee sat with his legs crossed beside renowned sitarist David Whetstone. Their collaboration of poetry and music stunned the crowd with a unique and entrancing ambiance. As each poem passed by, the claps from the crowd became louder and louder...

"How can I keep from celebrating these poems, now that I know them?" asks blogger Holly Wendt about her experience with Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011) by Aracelis Girmay. In her piece "Read and Recommended," she calls the poetry "vibrant, so much of everything I want to see everywhere: color and joy and snap." "First..." says Wendt, "I love BOA Editions. They make beautiful, interesting books that are written by artists I like a lot ... What remains with me from [Kingdom Animalia] as a whole is mortality ... I've never read a poetry collection like it." Explaining her point further,...

BOA poet Adrie Kusserow (Refuge, 2013) will join Yusef Komunyakaa, Bruce Weigl and Brian Turner this Friday, October 4, for a reading dedicated to refugee youth in South Sudan. Hosted by New York University's creative writing department, "Poets on War" will benefit refugee girls' education. All proceeds from the evening will go to Africa Education and Leadership Initiative (ELI), an organization which "builds gender equity, improved economic conditions, peaceful development, and strengthened leadership capacity in South Sudan by advancing women’s education through academic sponsorships, partnerships, enrollment-retention programs, and life-skills development." Kusserow will read from her new collection Refuge, a book of ethnographic poetry which probes...

Jim Daniels' new collection Birth Marks is honored as a 'September Exemplar' by the Washington Independent Review of Books. In her monthly column "Exemplars: Poetry Reviews," reviewer Grace Cavalieri compares Daniels to an athlete, for poetry that is "graceful, balanced and FAST. He writes till he gets to the finish line—the winner. His dominion is the grit of 'the city'—Detroit, Pittsburgh... He's a wellspring for all things during the steely 1970s, and folds that into the steely present day." The review makes it clear that Daniels' 14th poetry collection does not fall short: "Jim Daniels inspires us, his consumers, to...

A recent Publishers Weekly review is calling Michael Teig's new book There's a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick (BOA, 2013) a "mix of oddball phraseology and quiet pathos" which "should charm many readers and confuse some others..." "...in his image-rich free verse, the boundaries between cause and effect, the lines separating people, animals, vegetables, and manufactured products nearly disappear, creating a space part pastoral, part postmodern, and close to the poet’s peers and models... from Tomasz Salamun to Dara Wier." Commenting on the poet's distinctive style, the review says, "Teig... can pass from exhilaration to...