BOA Blog

Michael Waters' Gospel Night (BOA, 2011) has received recent attention and much praise from Poetry International. “In lines that are often metrically formal," says reviewer Michael Broek, "there is often a quite wild range of emotion, from the overtly sexual to the politically conscious, the plaintively domestic to the brashly cosmopolitan. This is highly energized verse, ‘Gospel Night’ suggesting the confluence of the putatively sacred with all that happens ‘at night’ – nightmares, porn movies, ghosts of dead heroes rising.” Much of the review focuses on the controlled structure of Waters' poems, contrasted with the content: “The book opens with a...

Among this country's oldest and most prestigious magazines is The Nation, which recently reviewed The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. Paired down, the review by Jordan Davis is a perfect guide to Clifton as an "exceptional poet." "What’s essential to know about the poetry of Lucille Clifton—what likely scared her about her writing, and what I don’t think anyone says about it—is that when she is good, she kills," says Davis while quoting her poem "at least we killed the roaches." The review moves steadily through the 770+ page collection, from book to book and poem to poem throughout...

For its July 2013 enewsletter on food, The Academy of American Poets asked some poets to share recipes for their favorites dishes and drinks. Since Summer is "the season of barbeques, fresh fruit, and culinary pleasures," and since "cooking, much like poetry, is a creative process," enjoy the recipe below that poet and translator Kazim Ali shared with the Academy: "Chocolate Peanut Butter Dairy-free Ice Cream." Kazim Ali is author of The Fortieth Day (BOA, 2008) and co-translator of the forthcoming Persian translation The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri (BOA, November 2013). Image courtesy of www.poets.org.

Charleston City Paper recently interviewed BOA poet Jillian Weise on her upcoming collection, The Book of Goodbyes.  Rather than delve into poetic terms and techniques, the interview focuses more on how Weise's external stimuli--geography and a prosthetic--influenced her lines. Elizabeth Pandolfi begins the article by divulging the book's unwritten prequel: "Poetry isn't what took Weise to Argentina originally. She was there thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, which she was using to conduct research on a novel about Charles Darwin. She'd applied to the program after a love affair at the University of Cincinnati, where she was doing doctoral work, ended...

"How well can we ever know the place we live in—the house, the neighborhood, the city, the moment? Is it possible to comprehend the way light, history, pianos, hawks, desire, trains, cruelty, red, Ben Franklin, faith, and baseball intersect in each fleeting second to create a place and time so particular in details it will never be repeated?," asks Michelle Salcido in a recent The Rumpus review of Litany for the City (BOA, 2012). "In his award-winning debut collection, Litany for the City, Ryan Teitman attempts a delicate and ambitious mapping of the self, the city, and the infinite connections...