BOA Blog

Poetry International recently reviewed Nikola Madzirov's poetry translation Remnants of Another Age  (BOA, 2011), charging the collection with an "uncanny sense of intimacy ... and, equally, a sense of intimacy to the uncanny." The review lists the tools Madzirov uses in his collection to create such an effect: "A penchant for skillful and inevitable repetition and the way each poem is inhabited by this sense of paradox and parallax view ... along with an ease--what seems a superior trust in glancing details to create their implications..." Futher dissecting these qualities, the review recalls Sigmund Freud's study of the word for better...

Save the Date! Sunday, September 29, 2013 We are thrilled to announce that renowned poet Li-Young Lee is coming to Rochester this fall, to read at BOA's 16th Annual Dine & Rhyme! For those unfamiliar with this highly-anticipated event, Dine & Rhyme is BOA's one-and-only fundraising event gala of the year. The evening includes a poetry reading and book signing, followed by a dinner and silent auction. (As a not-for-profit independent publisher, we rely on the generosity of supporters to help us bring wonderful and necessary literature to the public.) This Dine & Rhyme, Li-Young Lee will read from his...

Jim Daniels' new collection Birth Marks (BOA, Sept. 2013) is "an unflinching look at urban life through poetry," according to a press release by Carnegie Mellon University, where Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English. "In ... Birth Marks, Daniels captures the gritty culture of working-class urban life. He uses the 39 poems to take readers on a tour of post-industrial Detroit and Pittsburgh to tell the tales of cities and their residents who came out swinging when the economy collapsed around them." The release quotes Daniels: "I have always been interested in ordinary people in ordinary circumstances and...

A Publishers Weekly *Starred* Review is calling Jillian Weise's new collection The Book of Goodbyes (BOA, Sept. 2013) "...a smart and savvy ode to absences—of a lover, of a self, and of a part of the self, literal and figurative." The review ruminates on the structure of the book--with its "acts," a middle Intermission and a Curtain Call ending--and on Weise, as she writes "brilliantly" about being marked a "disabled" poet. "Intermission’s whimsical, hip fables star anthropomorphic finches, and the Curtain Call’s 'Elegy for Zahra Baker'—a philosophical tract on absence, presence, and pain—brilliantly examines the case of a missing person,...

Portrait of Ira Sadoff 20"x16" oil on canvas 2011, Michael Hafftka In a recent piece on The Huffington Post (online), painter Michael Hafftka and BOA poet Ira Sadoff (True Faith, 2012) ruminate, each on the other's respective arts. Featured in the piece is a painted portrait of Sadoff, by Hafftka, which is part of a series of  portraits the artist has created with poets as subjects. "I love poetry with its mysterious use of words, bending, creating, smearing words to reveal emotions hidden or apparent," says Hafftka. "Over the past 35 years and as part of my fascination with poetry, I have painted poets,...