BOA Blog

In a recent review by Bucknell University's West Branch Wired, Ira Sadoff's True Faith is used as an example in a bold resistance against the "perceived 'smallness' of contemporary American poetry," and the idea of contemporary "kitchen-window poets" who "simply gaze out their kitchen windows and write what they see." Grouped together with several other elite poets and compared with the "old gods" of poetry, Sadoff is acknowledged as a poet writing "ambitious" poetry, "poems that visibly grapple with difficult subjects, and that often do so with language that cuts roughly to the bone." Reviewer Matthew Ladd finds the poems...

On a quest for renewed inspiration for writers in 2013, Sycamore Review is praising Tony Leuzzi's new collection of interviews Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words. As per David Blomenberg's acclaim, works like Passwords Primeval, which divulge what "other writers have found inspiring, helpful," can help fellow writers to rekindle new "energy toward their own work." Blomenberg applauds Leuzzi's fresh and lively take on interviewing: "With some interview collections, the questions can become somewhat repetitive, but Leuzzi, while touching on discussions of tone and image and revision (which are common enough), takes advantage of opportunities for the poets...

A recent review from the Kenyon Review (Online) is calling Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things a “smart, startling, and wildly pleasurable book.” Already a winner of Three Percent’s 2011 Best Translated Book Award as well as the AATSEL 2011 Best Literary Translation into English Award, reviewer Dan Rosenberg concurs that the collection should receive such merits. According to Rosenberg, part of the appeal in The Book of Things is the way Šteger “grants the non-human stuff of the world the same agency and importance of humanity; it insists on the souls of things.” Rosenberg also gives credit to Brian...

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 is on the Powell's Books Blog's list of "Favorite Poetry Books of the Past Year and a Half," by reviewer Chris Faatz. "I once had the pleasure of meeting, and hearing read, the prominent African-American poet Lucille Clifton," says Faatz. "It was a high point of my literary life, as I'd admired her work for years... Now her main publisher, BOA Editions, has brought out one of the most beautifully designed books of the season with a table of contents that will floor even the casual reader." Like so many reviews of the...

Bruce Beasley's new collection Theophobia recently made Image Journal's Top Ten of 2012 list, out of more than one hundred books, films, albums, visual art collections, and television shows. "In Bruce Beasley's newest collection, the poet's belief and doubt are deconstructed and then uncertainly rebuilt. In his restless search for (and fear of) God, he combines the ambiguity of postmodernism, the precision of science, and the theology of mysticism into sprawling poems that add surprising twists to our images of divinity..." Calling Beasley "at once an academic and a layman, a parishioner and a theologian," the Image review dubs Beasley's...