BOA Blog

Ira Sadoff's latest collection True Faith (BOA, 2012) is one of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books of 2012! The collection of notable books was previously published in issue 43 of American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. According to the Academy, Sadoff's eighth collection of poetry "poses questions about happiness and resilience," with poems that "often gesture towards a common humanity," and in which "moments of divinity emerge in unexpected places." The Academy aptly notes that "...to Sadoff, it is imagination that allows faith, fosters possibility, and evidences beauty," recalling his poem "For Beauty":...

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 has made it to Amazon's 2012 "Books for Her" Holiday Gift Guide! This landmark collection is the culmination of a 40-year career by one of America’s most revered poets, combining all of Lucille Clifton’s published collections with more than 60 previously unpublished poems. The unpublished pieces feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress entitled Book of Days, and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful Foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, and a comprehensive Afterword by noted poet Kevin Young, frame Clifton’s lifetime body of work, providing a definitive statement about...

In his recent Los Angeles Review essay "The State of Black Poetry," Mitchell L. H. Douglas writes an extensive review of Aracelis Girmay's Kingdom Animalia, calling it a "masterful collection" with poems that "refuse to be taken for granted." Douglas specifically notes the collection's many references to hands and mouths, indicating that hands represent "power and control," while mouths—more complex—show intimacy. He aptly uses poems "Science" and "On Living" as examples, in which the wind takes us apart "with its blue hands," and the death of a mother means that her "mouth is gone." In Girmay's second collection, which Douglas...

Craig Morgan Teicher is high on On the Seawall's list of recommended new and recent collections for his latest, To Keep Love Blurry. "Teicher is gifted in his plainspoken articulations of a world steeped in disequilibrium for the child and parent alike. But disequilibrium does not engender despair. Teicher’s many vertiginous shifts do not leave us in a landscape of ennui, though a summary of the book’s subjects might suggest this — the loss of his mother while still a child, the fear of failed artistic accomplishment, the often inscrutable responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage. But such fierce challenges, such...

Mike Walker of Coal Hill Review offers remarkable praise for The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, commending both BOA and Ms. Clifton on the vision for this landmark volume and what it is all about. "Looking at this book as I removed it from its packaging, it was clear that BOA pulled out all the stops on this one, producing a beautiful volume that even has the now-rare bookmark ribbon one used to encounter more often in high-quality books, especially those on some sort of mission... BOA’s offerings are always exacting, pithy, and urgent books of poetry and short...