BOA Blog

BOA's A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize coordinator Albert Abonado recently interviewed BOA poet Sean Thomas Dougherty about his newest collection, Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line, and the state of American poetry. Anyone who knows Sean's poetry knows that he doesn't pull any punches - he throws them. Dorianne Laux calls Dougherty "a poet of grand and memorable vision" and describes Sasha as "the gypsy punk heart of American poetry." Patricia Smith believes that "this book will be the one that stamps his defiant signature on the canon." Dougherty's last book, Broken Hallelujahs, delved deep into his family history, including being...

[caption id="attachment_1048" align="alignleft" width="254" caption=""Free Radical" a portrait of Alan Michael Parker by Felicia van Bork"][/caption] "What is American about American Poetry?" That was the question posed by the Poetry Society of America upon the occasion of their centenary. BOA poet Alan Michael Parker - Love Song with Motor Vehicles (BOA, 2003) and Elephants & Butterflies (BOA, 2008) - tackled the question with his usual sense of intelligence, good humor, and linguistic acrobatics: "In my own work, the post-Romantic inheritance seems to me distinctly American; how the lyric defaults to a simplified artistic construct: experience + insight = epiphany. I spend a...

Anne Germanacos has lived between Greece and San Francisco for thirty years, writing singular and tragic fast-paced stories that pack a punch.  We sat down with Anne to get her take on writing, audience, and what we can look forward to from her in the future. [caption id="attachment_957" align="aligncenter" width="227" caption="Anne Germanacos. BOA fiction author."][/caption] BOA:  You've lived in two countries, cultures, and languages during your adult life.  How has this influenced your writing? ANNE:  I don’t know what I would have been without the experience of Greece and the United States, both, as well as Greek and English, cities, islands,...

There's too much news to focus on just one thing, so here's a tasty BOA news sampler to fill your tummy until Monday... Keetje Kuipers' Beautiful in the Mouth made the Poetry Foundation's Contemporary Poetry Best Sellers List for the week of Sept. 5-12! Along with making the list, Harriet (the blog of the Poetry Foundation) had this to say about it: "Beautiful in the Mouth by Keetje Kuipers makes its first appearance on the contemporary best seller list this week at number 7. That is a remarkable debut for a first book by a young poet—up there in the top ten...

[caption id="attachment_1038" align="aligncenter" width="241" caption="Barbara Jane Reyes. BOA Poet. Photo by Peter Dressel."][/caption] Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, is currently featuring Rigoberto González's interview with Barbara Jane Reyes about her new collection, Diwata (BOA, 2010). "You are right, in that Diwata does not primarily aim to critique colonialism or erase a colonial history, which is impossible to do. Rather, it foregrounds women who have resisted, survived, endured colonial invasion and dislocation. They have done so by being creative, by (metaphorically) shapeshifting, by passing down wisdom through the generations (through story, song, dance,...