Recent Blog Posts
TROUBLE THE WATER called 'hauntingly amusing'
Derrick Austin's debut collection Trouble the Water is receiving high praise from all over, most recently from The Rumpus and Pank Magazine. Both places highlight Austin’s fearless dive into issues of race, sexuality, and religion.The Rumpus focuses on Austin’s voice, and how he isn’t writing an angry war song, but rather a meditation on what the world could be like if we allowed ourselves to live with our hearts open: "At the end, Austin’s speaker does not instruct us to 'Make a fist,' to strike back at the world for its wrongs. Neither does he instruct us to fold our...
Bill Murray reads Lucille Clifton poem on Jimmy Kimmel Live
Legendary actor and comedian Bill Murray kicked off National Poetry Month by reading and discussing Lucille Clifton's poetry on Jimmy Kimmel Live!Regarding the recent feature in O, The Oprah Magazine, in which Bill Murray excerpts some of his favorite poems, Jimmy Kimmel says: "I have to say, poetry is not something that I ever read, but when I read these excerpts that you came up with, they all seemed great to me. This one in particular is great: 'What the Mirror Said.'"Nodding in agreement, Murray says of Lucille Clifton: "Her stuff's unbelievable. It's just incredible and I didn't know it...
PBS Newshour interviews Chen Chen
Poet Chen Chen. Photo by Jeff Gilbert.Chen Chen, the 15th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner, recently spoke to PBS Newshour about his identity and what it means to be Chinese, American, and gay. Chen focuses much of his poetry on how we form our identities.Chen says, “I felt like I couldn’t be Chinese and American and gay all at the same time. I felt like the world I was in was telling me that these had to be very separate things. Poems were a way for those different experiences to come together, for them to be in the...
D&C features BOA Editions on front page
Many thanks to Jeff Spevak and the Democrat & Chronicle for this front page feature on BOA's 40th anniversary!BOA Celebrates 40 Years of Fine PrintDemocrat & Chronicle | March 27, 2016A lot of rough water has passed under the bridge in the years since Al Poulin published the follow-up book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet that no one else wanted to touch, because its characters were speaking from the point of view of Nazis and German soldiers. BOA Editions’ first book, The Fuehrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress. Working out of the basement of his Brockport home, those early...
Announcement: Chen Chen wins Poulin Poetry Prize
We are thrilled to announce that Chen Chen is the winner of the fifteenth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for his collection When I Grow up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities. The collection was selected by highly-acclaimed poet Jericho Brown. Chen will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in spring 2017.Of the winning collection, Brown says, “Chen Chen refuses to be boxed in or nailed down. He is a poet of Whitman’s multitudes and of Langston Hughes’ blues, of Dickinson’s ‘so cold no fire can warm me’ and of Michael...