BOA Blog

Publishers Weekly has honored yet another of BOA's Fall 2012 titles with a *Starred* Review - this time, for Tony Leuzzi's Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words. "Poet and professor, Leuzzi brings questing intelligence and a practitioner’s empathy to this collection of interviews with 20 poets who are diverse in terms of aesthetic allegiance, generation, and practice." The review notes the breadth, not only of the number of prominent poets interviewed in the new book, but of the topics discussed and insights pulled from even the most unexpected of sources. "The range of topics proves that poetry...

An insightful interview with co-editor Michael S. Glaser ran in this past Sunday's Edition of The Baltimore Sun, Lucille Clifton's hometown newspaper. In the interview, Glaser goes into intimate detail about the process of filtering, selecting, editing, and compiling the many poems of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. "If you've ever heard Lucille talk," says Glaser, "you know that she could speak about the African-American experience and being part of an oppressed minority without making a white audience feel attacked. Instead, you'd come away feeling, 'Wow, we're all in this together and trying to make a better world.'...

In this week's The Buffalo News is a glowing review of the new Clifton collection: "Editor's Choice: Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton." In it, reviewer Jeff Simon expresses regret at the lack of attention given to Ms. Clifton, a Depew native, from The Buffalo News during her lifetime, though also gratitude that so many elsewhere "loved and honored" and read her work widely, and took it "with utmost seriousness." The review notes the book's Foreword by Toni Morrison, in which the Nobel Prize-winning author challenges us to read more into Ms. Clifton's profound intellect and scholarship, rather than merely her...

Photo courtesy of poets.org. Craig Morgan Teicher's new collection To Keep Love Blurry is in the spotlight once again, receiving mention in a recent issue of Vanity Fair: "Feet firmly on the ground, Teicher nimbly employs an array of forms, villanelles, sonnets, and prose in To Keep Love Blurry (BOA Editions) as he explores the shrinking and expanding spaces between husbands and wives, parents and children." Teicher, along with BOA poet Naomi Shihab Nye, are featured poets at this year's Poets Forum in New York City. This three-day (October 18-20) literary experience from The Academy of American Poets is known...

On October 11, the New York Times ran a review of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. While the review, by Dwight Garner, called out for a smaller edition of Lucille's poems (a missed opportunity to draw attention to Lucille's National Book Award-winning Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000), he also found much to praise in this new, landmark edition: "In an afterword, one of the book’s editors, the poet Kevin Young, notes that a few works were fished from a file that Clifton had titled “Unpublished Poems,” then retitled “Old Poems and Ones that May Not...