BOA Blog

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...

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 Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner, which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry last week. Austerity Go off the fiscal cliff with me, baby. I’m ready.We can hold hands while we blow throughWest Virginia quickly, since we’re halfway down77 past Charleston already, and I’m cranked onCherry Coke from Burger King, feet on the dash,wondering aloud if they’ll cart sad Dick Clark outagain for TV New Year’s Eve while the car radioplays Blue Öyster Cult (I’m...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is thrilled to announce that Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Jewish Book council announced the winners of the sixty-eight annual National Jewish Book Awards on their website this morning, January 9, 2019. Holy Moly Carry Me, Meitner's fifth poetry collection, plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. Her narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with racial tensions, religious identity, gun violence, raising children, and the anxieties of...

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 A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems. The Angels of Eternal Life If they remain alone, they never die. Their unmatched molecules are perfect, charged with energy distilled of entropy. Forever radiant with that one moment when they were utterly happy and fulfilled light-years before their birth, their eyes are moons staring at the sun, all day, all night. But they have to know each other. So they walk the streets, searching empty eyes of other beautiful strangers, desperate for one...