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 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...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem-in-translation is from Seed in Snow by Knuts Skujenieks, translated by Bitite Vinklers. The Voice of a Snowflake In a moment I'll melt—Enjoy me!Enjoy me as a work of art,as fruition,as a final result.But if you don't seein my small six-pointed shapethe tragedy of cyclones and anticyclones,the whiteness and blackness of the entire world,if you only delight in me,I will silently suffer:I will have arrived in vain,I will have melted in vain. Buy a copy of Seed in Snow from the BOA Bookstore....

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. We're kicking off the holiday season this week with a poem from Fuel by Naomi Shihab Nye. Boy and Mom at the Nutcracker Ballet There's no talking in this movie. It's not a movie! Just watch the dancers.They tell the story through their dancing. Why is the nutcracker mean? I think because the little boy broke him. Did the little boy mean to? Probably not. Why did the nutcracker stab his sword through the mouse king? I liked the mouse king....