BOA Blog

In a new review of Aracelis Girmay's the black maria, SCOUT says that Girmay's writing is "driven by a conceptual confidence that allows the entire book to function as a long, piecemeal 'elelegy.'"The review offers analyses of both sections in the book. "The first section, titled 'elelegy'—at once part of 'the English elegiac tradition and the ulalatory traditions of grieving and joy in cultures of North and East Africa'—is a suite of poems stricken with mourning for the 20,000 people that 'have died at sea making the journey from North Africa to Europe in the past two decades.' These poems...

Motionpoems's Season 7 premiered in Minneapolis, MN, on October 27, 2016. Each short film for the new season was adapted from work by a Cave Canem poet, and one of them featured "From 35,000 Feet/Praise Aviophobia," a poem from Geffrey Davis's Revising the Storm (2014). Directed by Chad Howitt, the film is available online (and below): "After animator/producer Angella Kassube first animated one of Todd Boss's poems in 2008, the duo started introducing other poets to other video artists -- and a new hybrid form was born! Motionpoems is a 501c3 nonprofit arts organization based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We partner...

Publishers Weekly recently named Aracelis Girmay's the black maria as one of five "Best Books of 2016" for poetry!In its starred review of the collection, PW says, "Girmay traverses the liminal zones between personal history and sociopolitics as she lyrically explores displacement, grief, systemic racism, and more in these gorgeous, heartbreaking, and incisive poems. The book comprises two distinct poem cycles in which the legacies of colonialism are ever-present and language the oceanic medium through which we are simultaneously separated and connected."Taking its name from the moon’s dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, the black maria investigates African...

Craig Morgan Teicher's forthcoming poetry collection The Trembling Answers was recently included in Library Journal's latest Prepub Alert, "Key Poetry Jan.-Apr. 2017."According to LJ editor Barbara Hoffert, "Prolific reviewer, Colorado Prize winner, and director of digital operations at Publishers Weekly, Teicher writes affectingly about family relations and the particular burdens and beauties of raising a disabled child. This is poetry, in other words, about how life really feels."At once an extension of and a departure from his previous explorations of family and art, Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers delves boldly into the tangled realms of fatherhood, marriage, and poetry....

The Academy of American Poets recently published a glowing review of Kathryn Nurnberger's The End of Pink in American Poets magazine and on Poets.org. Reviewer Jennifer Michael Hecht notes the book's strong themes, specifically the loss of innocence and the complexities of motherhood, which resonate throughout."Nuernberger’s second book is a visit to the end of innocence and an entry into the war-zone years of getting pregnant, giving birth, and early motherhood. The poet speaks this testimony through her fascination for nineteenth-century medical arcana and the various languages of science. On her own life she sneaks in wild testimony: there is...