BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_960" align="alignleft" width="295" caption="Aracelis Girmay. BOA Poet. Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award. "][/caption] We are thrilled to announce that Aracelis Girmay has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, Kingdom Animalia. Her book will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2011. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited and there is no formal submission process for this award. Poet, actress, and associate editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry and was the first recipient of the...

[caption id="attachment_448" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Carpathia by Cecilia Woloch"][/caption] Cecilia Woloch's collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succumbs to loss, where "fat bees [fall] into the wine" and the ghost swans have "wings of death."  The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I've seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up...

[caption id="attachment_957" align="alignleft" width="227" caption="Anne Germanacos. BOA fiction author."][/caption] In April 2007, BOA started publishing literary fiction through our American Reader Series. Our goal was to seek out and publish fiction that it is as singular and powerful as our poetry. Fiction written by authors more concerned with the artfulness of their writing than the twists and turns of plot . Fiction that is not only compelling to read, but also artistically excellent. Although we didn't consciously decide to focus on authors who hadn't previously published story collections, it makes sense that they are the lifeblood of the series. While we have no data to support this hypothesis, it seems that...

Happy Fourth of July from your friends at BOA Editions!

[caption id="attachment_849" align="alignleft" width="167" caption="Craig Morgan Teicher's "Cradle Book""][/caption] Library Journal, the publication of record for librarians across the country, says this of Cradle Book by Craig Morgan Teicher. What say you? Perhaps it's because morals sound archaic to the modern ear that anything that ends in one strikes us as less a story than an artifact. With this varied collection of short prose pieces, Teicher (Brenda Is in the Room & Other Poems) works at some remove from the traditional fable while forfeiting none of the surprise and humor that are part of the genre. While Teicher cops many...