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 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...

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,...