BOA Blog

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 Bruce Beasley's forthcoming collection All Soul Parts Returned—in stores next week or available now from the BOA Bookstore! On Marriage I. Wind's the medium of air. It says what's in the air's stasis we'd never hear. In the sibilation of its leaving it says what air would say (the kinesis of that silence) if stationary atmosphere could scrape, stridulous, itself against its unmoving self. II. Wind's air that sensed a near hollow in the pressure and poured toward...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week, BOA celebrates National Hispanic Heritage Month with a poem from Richard Garcia's The Persistence of Objects. My Mother and Your Mother My mother and your mother drinking tea in heaven—no, not heaven, but that place you go to live after you die and have acquired certain skills.Your mother wants to take my mother to the PX to stock up on Folgers coffee, Ritz crackers, and a couple of cases of gin. My mother wants to go to the new senior...

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 Chen Chen's Poulin Prize-winning, National Book Award longlisted debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities—on sale now in the BOA Bookstore! If I should die tomorrow, please note that I will miss the particular music of the word "callipygian," which means the having of well-shaped buttocks. I will miss the particular cruelty of tongue twisters in my first tongue: "Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí...

We're thrilled to announce that Chen Chen's debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is on the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry Longlist! The National Book Award celebrates the best of American literature and is awarded annually to one title in each of four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people's literature. Past winners of the National Book Award for Poetry have included Wallace Stephens, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashberry, Mary Oliver, and Lucille Clifton, who won the prize for her BOA collection Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems.  Finalists for...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's selections are from Sky Country by Christine Kitano—on sale now in the BOA Bookstore! Sky Country The Korean word for heaven is ha-neul nara, a kenning that translates literally to "sky country." It was a word often used by potential immigrants to describe the United States. 1. My grandmother hoards gold dollar-coins, the heavy discs etched with Sacagawea's over-the-shoulder glance, an infant son tied in a blanket to her back. she doesn't know who Sacagawea is, or Lewis and Clark, or figures...