BOA Blog

Congratulations to Barton Sutter for being featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry! Sutter's "A Little Shiver" from The Reindeer Camps (BOA, 2012) is an ideal selection for the winter season, and according to Kooser, a poet like Barton Sutter "knows all about cold and snow." A Little Shiver After the news, the forecaster crowed With excitement about his bad tidings: Eighteen inches of snow! Take cover! A little shiver ran through the community. Children abandoned their homework. Who cared about the hypotenuse now? The snowplow driver laid out his long johns. The old couple, who'd...

If you were to wonder what contemporary Polish poetry is like today, Gently Read Literature would hand you The Folding Star and Other Poems (BOA, 2012), with Polish poems by Jacek Gutorow and their English tranlsations by Piotr Florczyk. "From Marcin Bielski and Jan Kochanowski to the Polish poets of today," says a review by Gently Read Literature, "the ability of poetry to deal with nearly any topic and to especially tell little stories encapsulated in a few lines has long been a tradition of the Poles and an area of literature where they've displayed exceptional expertise. Gutorow has placed...

Todd McCarty of Gently Read Literature applauds Ryan Teitman for being a poet able to "communicate...at the right pace, allowing [his poems] to arise, unfold, then pass away," ultimately giving "power" to his new collection Litany for the City (BOA, 2012). Though the book's title may initially make us consider "city" as a "singular, organized unit," Teitman's "vision of the metropolis shifts and evolves in unexpected ways" and "explores the mutable boundaries of place and perception." According to McCarty, "person and location impact one another" in this new collection, creating a "geography of shifting experience." Also praised in this review...

BOA poet Barton Sutter is one of the select artists chosen for Duluth News Tribune's Best of Arts and Entertainment of 2012 list. Earlier in 2012, Sutter held a book release party for The Reindeer Camps (BOA, 2012), where he and his brother (The Sutter Brothers, a poetry-and-music duo) performed at the College of St. Scholastica. "He and his brother Ross performed... so instead of simply reading some poems (wonderful as they are) there was also music, sing-alongs, guest readings, and a lot of laughter... thoroughly entertaining." The article also briefly reviews Sutter's new collection The Reindeer Camps, calling it...

In a recent issue of the American Book Review, focused on Arab-American Literature, Naomi Shihab Nye's Transfer is called the "best work this much-honored poet has produced to date." Reviewer Norbert Hirschhorn acknowledges: "In much of Nye's earlier works... the poet's persona embraces sweetness, a witness to nature, and faith in the essential goodness of people," while also noting that Transfer tends to stray from that persona, embracing what Ted Hughes calls "the voice of pain." Nye's Transfer deals heavily with the difficult loss of her father, and the process of finding a dialogue with him even after his death. "The whole book...