BOA Blog

By popular demand, the BOA Poem of the Week has returned! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem was selected by Intern Noah M. from Sean Thomas Dougherty's The Second O of Sorrow. Biography of LeBron as Ohio When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Barakaon the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff,more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince.How back in those drunken days when I stillran in bars & played schoolyard ball&...

Readers in Rochester enjoyed a rare treat on Friday, April 20, when award-winning poet Chen Chen gave a free reading at City Hall in honor of National Poetry Month. The event was co-sponsored by the City of Rochester and BOA Editions, a local not-for-profit independent publisher of poetry and other literary works. Chen is a celebrated young poet whose debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities won the prestigious GLCA New Writer’s Award, the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Award, and was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. His work draws...

We are thrilled to announce that Chen Chen is the winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for his debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017). Chen was announced as winner at a ceremony held at the New School in New York, NY, on Thursday, April 26, 2018. "I am honored and astounded to receive this award for a book that I wrote really because I needed it—poems that refuse to separate sexuality and race, that are political and restless and just, a whole lot of gaysian...

Hello readers! Welcome back to Exploring the Backlist, where we join our team of interns as they explore over 40+ years of our publication history and share their passion for some of their favorite titles from BOA Editions. Today's post from Ashley F. finds "the complexities hidden in plain sight" in Desire Lines by Lola Haskins. My name is Ashley, and I am an English Literature major from The College at Brockport. For the past few months I have been interning with BOA Editions. I was asked if I would contribute a review of one of our previously published works. While I was...

Hello readers! Today is the official publication of Rail by Kai Carlson-Wee, and Kai sent us a special playlist of songs that inspired his work.  Listen to the playlist on Spotify and read Kai's liner notes below. Enjoy! A note from Kai Carlson-Wee: Most of the poems in RAIL were started while I was traveling. They typically began as scraps of sound, lyrics I jotted down, images, impressions, which I then cobbled together later on. Obviously the poems I was reading would fuel the sound, but just as often the music I was listening to would influence the writing. The way I listen to music is sort...