BOA Blog

With generous help from the Lannan Foundation, BOA Editions will be publishing Lucille Clifton's collected works in a volume featuring a foreword by Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison, afterword by noted poet Kevin Young, and statements of support from former Poet-Laureate  W.S. Merwin, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou. This monumental collection will include all of Clifton's published poems as well as previously uncollected, unpublished early, middle and later poems. For more about the Lannan Foundation and the BOA Editions Challenge Grant,  jump over to the Lannan Foundation's website.

In the review written by John Bradley for the new issue of Rain Taxi, Bradley highlights Nielsen's prose and how the poems in House Inspections take us into a dream world where everyday objects take on a new meaning. Bradley emphasizes how Nielsen's tone is objective and leaves the reader in a state of awe. Bradley says, "The prose poem's affinity for the surreal, however, should be celebrated, as should Nielsen's skill at plumbing the strangeness of the human psyche. House Inspections offers tantalizing mysteries for a world all too often gnawing on its own cynicism." Born in 1966, Carsten René...

Nikola Madzirov has hit the festival circuit this spring to marvelous acclaim! Check out Balkan Insight's review of his most recent readings and for information on upcoming appearances. For Nikola's book Remnants of Another Age, jump over to the Boa Bookstore where you will find it on sale for a special price!

Oxford Brookes Poetry Center greets the week with Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, "Moment." The Center's Poem of the Week service delivers a new selection to your inbox each week, and though Naomi is no new-initiate to the program, we are thrilled to see her work recognized "here," on "this fresh morning." For more information on the Weekly Poem, check out the Center's website, and of course, you can peruse through Naomi's other works at Boa's online bookstore.

[caption id="attachment_1518" align="alignleft" width="100" caption="BOA author and NBCC finalist Aracelis Girmay"][/caption] "There is a saying in Spanish, "Cada cabeza es un mundo," which translates "every mind is a universe unto itself." And Girmay's world, universe, opens new ways of seeing the simplest things and giving them voice. Everything contains some clue of another self, body or kindred spirit. Like an archeologist, she digs deeply finding herself in every living thing, even in the inanimate. Her magic is poetry at its best." So concludes Gregg Barrio's article on National Book Critics Circle finalist and Isabella Gardner Award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay's Kingdom...