BOA Blog

We are thrilled to announce that Aracelis Girmay has been selected as a finalist for the 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Often referred to as "the American Nobel," the Neustadt International Prize is a biennial award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and managed by the university's literary magazine, World Literature Today. In a review for the current issue of World Literature Today, poet Matthew Shenoda writes that Aracelis's poems are inhabited "by a people rooted in an antediluvian space, made rootless, or perhaps sent in search of new roots, by the political changes of a postcolonial globe" who "keep trees and flowers in their pockets,...

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 a selection from Lighthouse for the Drowning by Jawdat Fakhreddine. A selection from "September" 3. The garden of September comes to me and dozes on my sight, trembling with fatigue in the small sky, that which rapturously glitters on the green leaves, a sky that drags its robe over the trees. September comes to me. I sit up and face it with dreamful things a book, a pack of cigarettes, a cup of tea, and a bit of evening scattered,...

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 Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis, winner of the 13th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Farmer's Market Sweet Plums: Apology to the Flower Lady We have no issue with her, per se. Guilty, we knew already what we wanted long before we noticed the slow gesture of her fingers: flower to scissors, to vase, to flower again. Her painful carefulness—: that anonymous labor for more beauty qua beauty. She almost convinces us to forget the fruit...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. In honor of the solar eclipse and these late-August nights, this week's poem is from The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech by Stephen Dobyns. Good Days Jack McCarthy, Stand-Up Poet, 1939–2013 It had been one of those good days with friends and now we were sitting around the bonfire telling stories—a circle of light within the dark The wind through the trees above us sounded like faraway conversations, perhaps the talk of friends around bonfires in the past....

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 Craig Morgan Teicher's newest collection, The Trembling Answers (BOA 2017). Another Poem on My Daughter's Birthday There must be soft words for an evening like this, when the breeze caresses like gentle fingertips all over. I don't know how not to write darkly and sad. But it's five years today since my little girl was born, cut safely from the noose. We meant nothing but hope; how near death is to that. Only children, only some children,...