BOA Blog

Hello readers! Every week, BOA's staff and interns share a special poem from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye—now available for pre-order in the BOA Bookstore. Separation Wall When the milk is sour, it separates. The next time you stop speaking, ask yourself why you were born. They say they are scared of us. The nuclear bomb is scared of the cucumber. When my mother asks me to slice cucumbers, I feel like a normal person with fantastic dilemmas: Do I make rounds or sticks? Shall I trim the seeds?...

Hello readers! Every week, BOA's staff and interns share a special poem from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and finalist for the NCIBA Golden Poppy Book Award for Poetry. El Frutero Apá likes his fruit sweeter than his women.I imagine Apá growing a gardenin the next room though I know he is not.I imagine Apá holding my mother’s face beneath himand slowly parting its earth for a plum orchard.I open the door.I know I’m supposed to lookaway from his reaping.My mother’s face a blueonly known to...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is proud to announce that Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a finalist for the 2018 Golden Poppy Book Award for Poetry. The Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA), which presents the Golden Poppy Book Awards each spring, announced the short list for this year’s awards on their website on January 10. Winners for the 2018 Golden Poppy Book Awards will be announced in March. The NCIBA members praised Castillo’s poems in Cenzontle as “Unexpectedly deep for poems that on the surface look spacious and airy.” Cenzontle is Castillo’s debut poetry collection. The collection presents a...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is excited to announce that Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner is a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced the thirty-one finalists for all six NBCC Awards categories on their website this morning, January 22, 2019. “I'm thrilled that Holy Moly Carry Me was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and am grateful to all the book critics on the Board,” said Meitner. “It's an amazing thing to know that a book that was born out of very specific personal circumstances and...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is proud to announce that Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award in Poetry for his debut collection Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018). GLCA’s judges prased the collection with the following statement: “Castillo’s narrative itself couldn’t be more timely and significant: it’s a story of undocumented immigrants, border crossing, transgression, and the tantalizing fictions and facts of the American dream. From the opening poem, one is immediately drawn into the lush, honed music of these lines, which imaginatively translate states of dislocation, high anxiety, grief, and...