BOA Blog

"...somewhere between flash fiction and prose poems and memoirs..." Publishers Weekly can't quite ascribe a genre to Aurelie Sheehan's newest book, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA, October 2013), in this week's fiction reviews. Luckily that isn't essential to enjoying this "Collection of Histories," read as "small moments and objects that capture the essences of larger personal histories--lives made up of motherhood, writing, love friendships, and everything in between." The individual pieces within the book only take one sentence to summarize, but as a whole they function on a deeper, more literal level, actively depicting the process and pieces...

Jim Daniels' "American Cheese" is today's featured poem read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. Daniels' new and fourteenth poetry collection Birth Marks (BOA, September 2013) travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial city to another, across jobs and generations. Daniels focuses on the urban landscape and its effects on its inhabitants as they struggle to establish community on streets hissing with distrust and random violence. Read the poem below, and click here to listen to it read. American Cheese At department parties, I eat cheeses my parents never heard of—gooey pale cheeses speaking garbled tongues....

The Journal is calling Douglas Watson "a very smart writer," in a review of his new fiction collection The Era of Not Quite. "What it means to live in the Era of Not Quite is to reach for a thing, and not quite seize it. And then to keep reaching," says reviewer Elizabeth Zaleski. "Watson’s thoughts on this tension illustrate his sensibility as a writer..." The review places the new collection in a literary world where readers are made to question the very nature of writing, to the wires and seams: "The Era of Not Quite is a stunning example of...

We are thrilled to announce Robin McLean as winner of the third annual BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize for her collection Reptile House. The collection was selected from nearly 200 manuscript submissions by BOA Publisher Peter Conners. Robin McLean will receive a $1,000 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in spring 2015. Of the collection, Peter Conners says, “Robin McLean’s Reptile House introduces us to a debut author of audacious originality. Her stories probe the underbelly of human behavior revealing the darker motivations behind the chilling interactions she breathes to life. Like all great works of literature, the...

Hugh Martin; Photo courtesy of Akron Beacon Journal Hugh Martin recently sat down with the Akron Beacon Journal at his family's home in Macedonia, Ohio, to discuss what led him to turn his Iraq War experiences into his new book The Stick Soldiers. According to the piece, "Martin had never written a poem when he was deployed to Iraq nearly a decade ago." Instead, while taking a poetry class at Muskingum University after serving in Iraq, he discovered his poetic voice through encouraging professor, Jane Varley. "'He had a poet’s sensibility, and it was simple to get him started,' Varley said....