BOA Blog

Most people know Richard Foerster as a poet whose BOA books include Trillium (1998), Double Going (2002), and The Burning of Troy (2006). However a look inside most any BOA book on your shelf would reveal Richard Foerster as the typesetter behind BOA's beautiful finished collections. To use a rock-n-roll analogy, Richard is "the fifth Beatle" at BOA - a typesetter and proofreader extraordinaire who makes sure our books are as beautiful looking as the poems are beautiful to read. Richard recently gave an extensive interview with Connotation Press about his life and poetry. His responses revealed his perspective on...

It's been an amazing year for poetry and on top on our list has been the publication of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. We're thrilled that the book has also been named at the top of Publishers Weekly's list! PW has just announced that The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton is one of their picks for The Best Books of 2012. In their announcement, PW describes the book as "One of the most significant books of poetry to come out in years, this is the life's work of a major poet who wrote with powerful anger about the...

A new review of The Folding Star and Other Poems by Jacek Gutorow featured in Stride Magazine, begins with an excerpt from a letter in which Gutorow reveals his concerns about poetry in translation: "There is something paradoxical about the effects created by poetry in translation. The poets who are deeply immersed in their native language, who are capable of articulating complex meanings connected with innumerable modulations of colloquial speech, and who manage to sound out the unique frequencies of their languages by experimenting with etymology or phraseology, are usually poorly served by translators whose technical abilities may be splendid...

Writer Josephine Carr of CarrTalks sits down with Wendy Mnookin for an inspirational interview. Radiating humor and wisdom, Ms. Mnookin shares her interests and fears, which inevitably become inspiration for her own writing. When asked if she would describe writing to be her calling or her career, Ms. Mnookin responds: "I feel that writing is my calling and teaching is my career. I write because I have to: that's how I attend to my world, how I understand and organize experience. I love my teaching, more so as I get older and feel I have more to share with my...

Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Blogs honors the late writer Louis Simpson not only for his craft, but also for his personal life which inspired it. Astley reflects deeply on Mr. Simpson's life, praising him infinitely for the identity struggles he endured during his lifetime. Born in Jamaica, Simpson felt himself to be an outsider as he moved to and navigated through the U.S. Astley describes Simpson's poems in The Owner of the House as being "informed by a melancholy clear-sightedness, a generous, wry sense of humour, and a determination to celebrate the true lives and capacities of ordinary people. If Chekhov...