BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_599" align="alignleft" width="107" caption="Michael Blumenthal. BOA poet."][/caption] Poet David Kirby has been teaching Michael Blumenthal's new book AND to his students at Florida State University - and the students have been eating it up. (What smart students!) In the process of teaching, David has been asking Michael, via email, to discuss some of his writing process on the book. I was fortunate enough to catch the tail end of that discussion and asked Michael to put together a concise paragraph that I could share on the BOA blog. Thanks to Michael for sharing these words on AND, which Publishers...

[caption id="attachment_369" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Naomi Shihab Nye. BOA Poet."][/caption] "Well, we need to keep extending imaginations, pressing, repeating, invoking, suggesting what other realities might exist, instead of the nightmares of war and hatred and conflict." Naomi Shihab Nye's above response during an interview with Cerise Press is as good a summation of her poetics as I've ever heard. The interview digs into the intersection - and possibilities - of the intersection between art and politics (by which I mean: peace). Read the interview here [Cerise Press Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye]

[caption id="attachment_591" align="alignleft" width="120" caption="Ray Gonzalez. BOA poet."][/caption] Here's a great review of Cool Auditor by Ray Gonzales from the El Paso Times. You can read the start below and then read the complete review here: [El Paso Times Review of Cool Auditor] "Ray Gonzalez's newest book, "Cool Auditor: Poems" (BOA Editions, $16 paperback), is a collection of prose poems that reveals this prolific writer at the height of his powers. Gonzalez, an El Paso native and a professor of creative writing at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, has published 10 previous books of poetry, as well as three...

David Gura from NPR's "All Things Considered" put together a beautiful tribute to Lucille that was broadcasted last weekend. The piece begins: "As a girl growing up in the 1940s on Lake Erie, Lucille Clifton never thought she would become a poet. "The only poets I ever saw were the portraits that hung on the walls in elementary school in Buffalo, N.Y.," she said in 1993. "Old, dead white men, with beards, from New England." Clifton did not look like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or John Greenleaf Whittier or Walt Whitman. She was a woman and an African-American, and later, a...

[caption id="attachment_575" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Bill Moyers Journal."][/caption] The tribute to Lucille by Bill Moyers was one of the most beautiful pieces on a poet I have ever seen. Lucille's readings are powerful, playful, deadly serious, and passionate. Moyers eloquently described the impact of her work and the combination of interviews, readings, and information about Lucille's career presented a well-rounded portrait of the poet. In his introduction to the piece, Moyer's said, "The long arc of morality that bends toward justice leads not only through the courthouse and the statehouse but out on the streets and in the pages of poetry...