BOA Blog

Happy New Year! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. The BOA team is excited to continue our Poem of the Week series with an ars poetica from the Isabella Gardner Award-winning collection Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan. Poetry It's like tuning slowly around our Zenith radio's glowing shortwave dial as I did as a child, listening for the voices from Madagascar, Fiji, the Canary Islands, I could spend hours like this, eyes closed, ear pressed to the speakers to catch snatches of language between high-pitched squeals and long patches of static, and...

Merry Christmas, readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. Our gift to you this week is a special poem from Rare Earths by Deena Linett, which was reprinted in Angels of Poetry (2006): a limited run anthology celebrating BOA's 30th anniversary featuring commentary from some of BOA's most beloved poets from our first 30 years. We hope you enjoy this special look at one of our cherished memories.Thank you for all your support, for your comments, and for your readership this past year. We are excited to bring you new collections of...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Sean Thomas Dougherty's forthcoming collection The Second O of Sorrow—now available for pre-order from the BOA Bookstore. In the Light of One Lamp I crawled into bed and closed my eyes and not long after heard the small hooves of the horses, the tiny ones that gallop in our dreams, or are they the dreams of our children, galloping through the black ruins. Everything we do is against the crippling light. To hear them cry at night is...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Ray Gonzalez's Beautiful Wall, which poet Roy G. Guzmán recently praised as Gonzalez's best work. Double Seasons These are the double seasons of loss, the horizon where red mountains are old sunsets, the empty truck swirling down the dirt road, heavy with outlawed cargo. These are the days of ceremony and holy thoughts, communion in abandoned churches where horses and men were destroyed long ago, a legend still untold. There are two tracks in the sand, one leading north...

In a guest post for the November issue of Poetry, poet Roy G. Guzmán celebrates how the unsung poetry of Ray Gonzalez captures "the different angles of our Latinx experiences." "Here was a celebration of people like me," Guzmán writes, "of the poetry we put in our bodies, of the stories, people, and language slipping away from us. The speaker of the poem becomes Chorizo Warrior, La Familia Detective, Memory Weaver, Brown Possibility. In 'Praise the Tortilla, Praise Menudo, Praise Chorizo' I continue to hear Anne Sexton’s 'In Celebration of My Uterus,' Ross Gay’s 'Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,' Martín Espada’s 'Alabanza: In...