BOA Blog

In a recent review by The Rumpus, Craig Morgan Teicher's To Keep Love Blurry is praised for its "attention to our formal and confessional roots," as it includes and compares with such "giants" as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Frost. As Teicher's "sensitive poems explore the 'blurriness' in marriage, parenthood, and personhood," the thorough review notes how the poet "seems driven to avoid the affects of his predecessors." Teicher straddles true confessional poetry with the "constructed voice," which can turn "clumsy, complex emotions into a more attractive, better sounding object," and thus, "encourages thoughtfulness but often falsifies our real...

Please take a few minutes to watch this powerful video, depicting one of the most profound moments in poetry. This is why BOA is here. what the mirror said An adaptation of the poem by Lucille Clifton Directed and Produced by Sydney Howe Adapted and Performed by Prerna Class 11 Prerna School is a free afternoon-only school run by Study Hall Educational Foundation in Lucknow, UP, India. Prerna exclusively serves underprivileged girls from the surrounding slums in the Study Hall neighborhood. Many students work as domestic helpers both before and after attending school and most would not be able to...

Jillian Weise, author of the forthcoming The Book of Goodbyes (BOA, Fall 2013), is already receiving praise for her new poetry collection in an NPR Books 2013 poetry preview: "...make sure to check out The Book of Goodbyes by Jillian Weise, whose debut, The Amputee's Guide to Sex, was that and much more. This second collection is a swirling set of love poems to a beloved as omnipresent as he is illusive." Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, The Book of Goodbyes speaks to a certain deranged love that throws into question sex, legality, gender-politics, disability, and the end...

sorrow song for the eyes of the children, the last to melt, the last to vaporize, for the lingering eyes of the children, staring, the eyes of the children of buchenwald, of viet nam and johannesburg, for the eyes of the children of middle passage, for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes, russian eyes, american eyes, for all that remains of the children, their eyes, staring at us,      amazed to see the extraordinary evil in ordinary men.   --lucille clifton (1987)

Since the National Endowment for the Arts has officially announced its 2013 list of recipients for its $25,000 Creative Writing (Poetry) Fellowship Grant, BOA is proud to announce poet Ryan Teitman as one such recipient. Teitman's first poetry collection Litany for the City won him the 10th Annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (selected by Jane Hirshfield from more than 600 manuscripts), and was published by BOA this past spring. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. The NEA supports artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for...