BOA Blog

With the 16th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize just around the corner, we are thrilled to announce that renowned poet Brenda Shaughnessy will judge this year’s contest. BOA will accept first-book poetry manuscripts for the prize from August 1 - November 30, 2016.Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of So Much Synth (Copper Canyon, 2016); Our Andromeda (2012), a finalist for the international Griffin Poetry Prize; Human Dark with Sugar (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award; and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). The...

We are proud to announce that Nin Andrews's Why God Is a Woman has been named a finalist for the 2016 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry, given by the Ohioana Library to books and authors with Ohio roots or subjects.Other poetry finalists include Ross Gay, Tasha Golden, William Greenway, and Jeff Gundy. The lists of finalists in other categories include Gloria Steinem, David McCullough, and Karl Rove.Set on a magical island where women rule and men are the second sex, Why God Is a Woman is the story of a boy who, exiled from the island because he could not...

Words Without Borders recently reviewed Mangalesh Dabral's new Hindi translation This Number Does Not Exist, noting the author's "gift for sharing his inner life."Reviewer Kate Prengel writes that Dabral uses "a spare, concrete language that lends itself beautifully to translation," while also noting the themes of his poems: "so simple they verge on being impersonal: childhood, sunshine, concerns about the future. Nothing here is developed enough to give it an individual character. It is up to the reader to supply the details. This poem, like many of Dabral’s works, escapes from impersonality only when the readers dip into their own memories and enrich the poem...

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 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,...