BOA Blog

The Era of Not Quite is "brilliant," according to Lev Grossman, New York Times best-selling author (The Magicians; The Magician King) and book critic for TIME magazine. The mention of Douglas Watson's new debut fiction collection comes from a recent Barnes & Noble interview with Grossman and Elliot Holt, both judges for this year's ninth annual Tournament of Books, presented by Nook and Barnes & Noble. In the interview led by novelist and Tournament of Books co-founder Rosecrans Baldwin, Grossman and Holt discuss the state of fiction today, while also commenting on literary criticism and little-known publishers, titles, and authors which...

In a recent Devil's Lake interview with Hugh Martin, the poet shares some new and intriguing insights on writing poetry and essays, dealing with ethically and politically-charged subjects, and his new book The Stick Soldiers (BOA, 2013). In the Q&A led by Jacques J. Rancourt, Devil’s Lake gets Martin's inside perspectives on truth, navigating fact and fiction, the tradition of war poetry, writing humor, and his obligation to maintain humanity in his poetic voice. As with all poetry, the lines between fact and fiction are somewhat blurred in The Stick Soldiers. "...In the military," says Martin, "there is an unwritten...

The Rumpus review is calling Bruce Beasley a "capacious mind... one of contemporary poetry’s most cerebral and searching voices..." for his newest collection Theophobia. Reviewer Julie Marie Wade likens Beasley to Harryette Mullen, Brenda Hillman, and Jorie Graham, for his work that is both "challenging" and "provocative." The review notes that Beasley's work cannot be "merely read"; it requires great and "real" work of "inquiry and contemplation." "...There is a tidal force at work in these poems," says Wade. "They rush toward the reader with frenetic intensity, then slowly recede, leaving us drenched in language that is working at its highest...

"Though the poet is three years dead, her shiny, sly, red-lipped brown face looks up at me in the morning from her book jacket by my bed. Her smile undresses all my foolishness. Her name is Lucille Clifton, and if this were a wiser country, it would be known even to school children." Reviewer Robert Hirschfield asserts this praise and more in a heartfelt Matador Network | Travel Culture Worldwide review of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. In his piece, "Traveling with poet Lucille Clifton in her afterlife," Hirschfield says he reads the "Collected Clifton" almost religiously. "Clifton’s poems...

Publishers Weekly is calling BOA's forthcoming Spring 2013 translation Light and Heavy Things a “moving and timely glimpse into contemporary Pakistani literature.” “Plainspoken and image-driven, Sahil’s poems rarely break a page but offer complex portraits of contemporary Pakistani life in which nature, city, war, and human emotion all entwine with the quotidian,” says the review. "At times the poems seem driven by personal longing: 'I stared out the window./ Dreams built their nests in my eyes,/ and the cage was empty.' At others, their force can be of the collective and political kind: 'Always in the city/ on our way...