BOA Blog

During his Brooklyn book launch for The Era of Not Quite, hosted by Freebird Books, Douglas Watson performed his own musical original as a finale to accompany the new book. Joining him on ukulele is Hannah Tinti, co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine, and on percussion, BOA's own Anthony Tognazzini (even though there weren't any drums). Check it out! You'll be singing it for days. In preparation for Douglas Watson's honored appearance as one of seven One Story literary debutantes at the One Story Literary Debutante Ball tomorrow night (June 6), Watson is introduced with a new One Story...

According to Publishers Weekly, poet Hugh Martin's The Stick Soldiers is a "solid, sad verse debut," as it recounts his years preparing for, journeying to, and returning from the Iraq war. "Stateside training generates some of his strangest, harshest poems, including a prose anecdote that might describe a murder. Time back at home, in snowy Ohio, prompts alienated, ambivalent regret, comparable at best to Randall Jarrell’s poems on World War II airmen and veterans. Yet the bulk of the book, and its reason for being, involve Martin’s time in Iraq. Sand gets everywhere, IEDs could be anywhere, children are sources...

The Missouri Review (online) has featured Douglas Watson's "Against Specificity," the first story in his new collection The Era of Not Quite, for National Short Story Month. Reviewer Kyle Minor says the story is "among the most extraordinary stories [he's] ever read." Watson is the winner of the inaugural BOA Short Fiction Prize and works for Time magazine. The story's opening line is remarkable, "a distillation of general Americanness... the bare bones set-up that fuels 90% of all American fiction." The trouble: You want Thing A but are stuck with Thing B. According to Minor, Watson flouts fiction-writing standards in...

BOA's 2012 translation of Jacek Gutorow's The Folding Star and Other Poems was featured in The West Coast Translation Review earlier this month. In "Jacek Gutorow and Contemporary Polish Poetry," reviewer Kaitlin Dyer contrasts Gutorow's work with that of previous Polish poets: "...while Gutorow may draw on the roots of Polish poetry, he also departs from the well known tradition." Dyer describes Gutorow's writing as "distinct and evocative," its diction "commanding." According to the review, this makes Gutorow an artist of particular interest for readers of Polish poetry, as it focuses more often on questions than resolutions. Gutorow is characterized as a poet with a well defined and authoritative voice, who...

"we listen to the eucalyptus scratch the violet sky" Hugh Martin reads his poem "Foot Patrol" during an on-air interview with Iowa Public Radio, as interviewer Charity Nebbe "explores art created by veterans in their post-military lives." The initial serenity of eucalyptus in the poem is juxtaposed with the violence that Martin experienced first-hand during the Iraq war. Martin admits in the interview that his interest in poetry prior to Iraq was not piqued until he took an undergraduate creative writing class. In the recent Spring 2013 Issue of The Iowa Review, Hugh Martin is featured as the winner of the...