BOA Blog

Over a year-long period, poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep exchanged poems through emails, sometimes at a furious pace. Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is the culmination of these exchanges, and represents one of the most engaging and expansive collaborative projects, a collection that Bin Ramke refers to as being "Powerful and elegant."  What emerged from these poems was not a voice that either could say belonged wholly to Gallaher or Waldrep, but a third mysterious voice. Gallaher and Waldrep return to that experience in a series of conversations to discuss the process of writing the poems. In...

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher's collection Your Father on the Train of Ghosts has been hailed before as the seamless product of a collaboration which, rather than producing a host of call-and-response or exquisite corpse poems, comes through with a third, somewhat different voice than either poet alone. In Newcity Lit's recent review of the book (and it's hard to call it just a book), however, the interlacing of American Life as subject matter with this new voice is also examined. Tackling "an undeniably complicated, expansive subject," Waldrep and Gallaher's poems "slip fluidly from topic to topic, from the interior...

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher received praise for their collection of poetry, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.  Boston Review notes that this poetry calls in a unique perspective of collective voice between the two authors.  The poetry is seamlessly assembled into poems with "real strength." Waldrep and Gallaher's poetry is a pleasing "example of contemporary work" that seeks to "express the exhaustion of excess."  Not one poem is wasted in contributing to the collection.  Each poem dives into the communion of speakers and souls as they share awareness and become a whole new creative voice together. Together, Waldrep and...

Aleš Šteger's poem "Egg," from his collection of translated poetry The Book of Things, was chosen to feature as today's Poem of the Day by the American Academy of Poets. Translated by Brian Henry, Šteger's poetry often focuses on simple, everyday objects, but in his poetry these normal items become strange, new, and utterly other. Today's "Egg" is written in this tradition, juxtaposing the tranquility of breakfast with the threatening images of the eye, the gaze, and questions no one wants to answer before coffee. Egg When you kill it at the edge of the pan, you don't notice That...

Cecilia Woloch's poem "My Mother's Pillow," from her book Late, was recently selected as the weekly poem in American Life in Poetry, a "project for newspapers" run by 2004-2006 US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. "I don't often mention literary forms," Kooser writes in his brief introduction to Woloch's work, "but of this lovely poem... I want to suggest that the form, a villanelle, which uses a pattern of repetition, adds to the enchantment I feel in reading it. it has a kind of layering, like memory itself." Read "My Mother's Pillow" on American Life in Poetry here. Like what you...