BOA Blog

At the end of each year, the New York Times Magazine does a tribute to important cultural figures that passed away. The feature is called "The Lives They Lived." This year they included a beautiful tribute to Lucille Clifton, including rare insights from one of her daughters: “I’ve got some fox poems going around in my head,” Alexia remembered her mother saying, much as she had long ago, with her six young children playing around her, when she was inspired by something seen or contemplated and sat down at the typewriter at the dining table — or took the pen...

[caption id="attachment_1150" align="aligncenter" width="265" caption="The Poetry Foundation's Whitman-Santa image"][/caption] Special occasions often draw new readers to poetry. There's just something about the perfectly placed poem that sets off an event and turns it into something truly unforgettable. So it was a great idea for the Poetry Foundation to post a feature on Christmas poems on their website. Let's hope they do this every year... but with BOA poems included! (-; [Christmas Poems]

Latern Review - the journal of "Asian American Poetry Unbound" - reviews Barbara Jane Reyes' Diwata for their December 20 blog: "In Poeta in San Francisco, Barbara Jane Reyes’ previous book, diwata was someone “elders say” had once “walked on earth” before the “the nailed god came” (30). These are the traces and rumors from which the titular Diwata of her latest book is resurrected. Then, like slippery oral art, like slips of the tongue, creation stories about men, women, and diwata—a god or spirit in Philippine mythology—are made up and told again and again. The poems in Diwata draw...

"Society needs art more than art needs society. Art has always existed in nature, no matter what society springs up around it, but it's we who need art to make our lives whole." Matthew Shenoda has published two collections of poetry, Somewhere Else and Season of Lotus, Season of Bone, the latter, published by BOA in 2009. He currently holds two positions within the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. The interview with Caty Gordon from The Minnesota Review, touches on everything from the evidence of Egyptian influence in Shenoda's writing to his passion for Reggae...

Let it be known that on Friday, December 3rd, FuturPointe Dance came to BOA's holiday gala and rocked the house. See for yourself! This is a video of the dance they choreographed as an interpretation of the poem"The City in Which I Love You" by Li-Young Lee. Keep in mind, they're performing in a small hallway outside the BOA office and basically no one watching even knew this was about to happen. Talk about a nice surprise! The featured dancers are: N'jelle Gage, William Knighten, Melinda Phillips, Heather Roffe, and Guy Thorne. The art projection you see in the background was done by Guy Thorne...