BOA Blog

Peter Makuck's new poetry collection, Mandatory Evacuation, has been named a "November 2016 Exemplar" by Grace Cavalieri of the Washington Independent Review of Books. According to Cavalieri, "Makuck writes as if the world is a sacred ground worth recording into poetry. His work respects nature and relationships; and if these were the last words left in his heart he could be proud. In Buddhism, the path is said to be, among other, things right speech, right action; and we could complete the precepts by saying right art because if you follow the thread through all the systems in this complex tapestry of people places things, the guiding...

       Aracelis Girmay's the black maria and Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink are included in On the Seawall's semi-annual feature "Nine Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles," for which highly acclaimed poets write briefly on some of their favorite recently published titles.Poet Safiya Sinclair recommends the black maria, calling the collection “astounding” and “incredible.” She says: “Girmay’s poetry entrances with breathless beauty as she carefully traces the sea’s dark history from 1702 to 2015, addressing the anguish of the African diaspora in a long cycle of poems called elelegy . . . The book’s titular second section conjoins this past violence with the...

We are thrilled to announce that BOA is adding two new staff members to our team! Please join us in welcoming Kelly Hatton, our new Director of Development & Operations, and Ron Martin-Dent, our new Director of Publicity & Production.After a nationwide search, we whittled down our total candidate pool from more than 40 applicants to 10 for an initial round of interviews. Applications arrived from around the country and we were impressed with the passion that so many candidates showed for furthering BOA’s mission. Ultimately, three finalists per position were selected to continue on to the competitive final interviews,...

Calling Robin McLean's BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning collection a "fabulous debut," Nathan Goldman of the Kenyon Review delves deep into the unique qualities of Reptile House: "McLean’s prose unites Carveresque minimalism and Pynchonian—even Biblical—maximalism to create stories that, at their best, press past the human and court the limits of the knowable."Focusing on fascinating characters and stories from the book, Goldman observes, "McLean both complicates an anthropocentric understanding of the cosmos and troubles the conception of nature as reducible to determinant, efficient causes. She thus allows us to grasp the interdependence of living and nonliving entities and, perhaps, to understand...

In a fascinating new interview with John Hoppenthaler of Connotation Press, BOA poet Sean Thomas Dougherty discusses everything from writing habits to early work, from Frank O'Hara to Bob Dylans's Nobel Prize.Here are some of the highlights:About his writing habits, Dougherty says, "I learned a long time ago to write down on scraps of paper lines as they come to me through the dailyness. At the end of the day I might have five or six slips of papers, hastily written I-did-that-or-this-notes, noticings, and a random metaphor, a witnessing of some interaction I saw at the bus-stop or on the...