Recent Blog Posts
The Journal calls BEAUTIFUL WALL 'a profound journey'
West Virginia newspaper The Journal recently ran a review of Ray Gonzalez's award-winning Beautiful Wall in its Weekender section, calling the book a "profound journey into the heart of a man familiar with the gods of poetry, politics, and art."Reviewer Sonja James praises Gonzalez's ability to combine his surrealistic style with the current issues surrounding the U.S. including religion, immigration, and racism. She says: "These poems celebrate humanity in its relationship to the greater undercurrents of being in the world. . . . This is a bright and generous book proving that poetry sustains us in our quest for the...
Poetry Northwest calls TESTAMENT 'a truly major poetic achievement'
Poetry Northwest recently reviewed G.C. Waldrep's Testament, offering an in-depth analysis of the book-length poem, and calling it "a truly major poetic achievement."Reviewer R.M. Haines praises Waldrep's ability to drive against the stereotypical idea of a testament through his inclusion of "rhetorical discontinuity, protean lexical range, relentless associative leaps, and daringly abstract aphorism." Haines describes the work as a stroke of "genius." In the book-length poem, Waldrep takes themes such as religion, race, and personal life experiences, and leaves them open-ended enough to for readers to "discover a new idiom of extraordinary freedom, dexterity, and scope" within his words. The review concludes: "Ultimately,...
YOU WHO CROSS MY PATH named a WLT 'Nota Bene'
Erez Bitton's poetry collection You Who Cross my Path, translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller, has just been selected by World Literature Today as a May Nota Bene.The WLT review calls the collection "concise yet emotional," with poems that "range from discussions of love and beauty to childhood, the poet’s blindness, and his identity as an Israeli of North African descent and the first poet to employ Judeo-Arabic dialect in his work. This bilingual edition includes work from two of his books, allowing an extensive entry to his world without sight but with profound observation."This first US publication of Erez...
THE INNOCENT PARTY inspires new album
Aimee Parkison's book of short stories, The Innocent Party (BOA, 2012), is the inspiration for much of the new album being released by Portland, OR, punk band The Taxpayers. In a DS Exclusive premiere of the upcoming album, Big Delusion Factory, singer Rob Taxpayer talks about his inspiration from Parkison's story "Call Me Linda.""'Call Me Linda' is the oldest song on Big Delusion Factory. The opening line comes from a short story in The Innocent Party by the author Aimee Parkison, who is a fiction writer that I like. A few years back, I was having some trouble writing anything,...
Christian Barter wins Isabella Gardner Poetry Award
We are proud to announce that Christian Barter has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for his new collection, Bye-Bye Land! His book will be published by BOA Editions in spring 2017, within the American Poets Continuum Series. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited; there is no formal submission process for this award.Poet, actress, and Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry, and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. She...