BOA Blog

Ira Sadoff’s True Faith (BOA, 2012) is both "provocative and mature,” according to Gently Read Literature. The collection wrestles with notions of “god, country, and self,” and it is through explorations of these themes that Sadoff becomes a “skilled craftsman, imparting his vision—and his questions—in perfectly sculpted bursts of powerful language.” True Faith openly admits to a negative, sometimes “derisive” tone, but not without purpose. In an attempt to “reach the core of the human mind and heart,” Sadoff interrogates "ideas of faith," juxtaposes a “young man’s innocence” with a “naïve and sleeping America,” boldly exposes our “inability to communicate...

As we close the chapter on this year’s National Poetry Month, Kazim Ali shares a few words about poetry’s importance in everyday life, and reads his poem “Ocean Street” on NPR's Weekend Edition. Likening poetry to the human body, Ali says: “The line of poetry teaches us about the length of breath, and the way energy moves through a poem teaches us about the way breath and blood move through the human body.” In other words, poetry is a way of living. Ali is the author of The Fortieth Day (BOA, 2008), and co-translator of BOA's forthcoming Iranian translation The...

Rain Taxi Review of Books is calling Bruce Beasley's Theophobia "inventive," an "important contemporary addition to poetic wrestling with the religious," compared with the works of Augustine. Among other praises, reviewer Spencer Dew marvels at the creative manner by which Beasley addresses the divine while simultaneously speaking to such topics and objects as Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite of the feline digestive tract, or a TiVo Customer Service telephone line. How does he do it? "[Beasley] manages to keep the reader connected by stitching such abstract and conceptual musings to the recognizable and known. Voicemail messages warning of call volume, popups...

"Folks, get into Geffrey Davis," says Muzzle magazine (online) of the most recent winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Davis was chosen for Muzzle's "30 Under 30" for his poem "What I Mean When I Say Elijah-Man," from his Poulin Prize-winning manuscript Revising the Storm. While the word "masculine" has long been associated with that which is "muscular, rigid, strong, recluse, stubborn, and fisted," Muzzle speaks on the "softness" of masculinity, which is represented in Davis’ poetry: "Geffrey Davis’ work takes that off and splits it open, shows us the soft cotton that makes the word muscular, the tender,...

Douglas Watson’s short story “The Messenger Who Did Not Become a Hero” was recently published in One Story, following an insightful Q&A with the author that the literary magazine published last month. The story is part of Watson's new debut fiction collection The Era of Not Quite, which will be released by BOA in May. One Story prides itself on "thorough editing," and has, admittedly, "never seen a story that could not be improved by editing.” That is, until they encountered Watson's “The Messenger Who Did Not Become a Hero.” "The day after we accepted the story, I sat down...