BOA Blog

Two of BOA's newest poetry titles, Nickole Brown's Fanny Says and Devin Becker's Shame | Shame, recently received outstanding Booklist reviews. Calling Fanny Says "poignant, funny, and utterly real," Booklist says: "After the loss of a loved one, people have a tendency to narrow memory’s lens to focus solely on the person’s best qualities. It’s more rare to find someone both remembering and appreciating the whole of a person. . . . Fanny’s tone and inflection come alive through the series of poems based on her actual words. And through Brown’s vivid, honest, and surprisingly nonjudgmental reflections, we develop, page...

"Reading Nickole Brown’s new book of poems, Fanny Says, is like being introduced to someone you never want to let go, the kind of fierce, tender, acerbic, complicated woman who will snag you by your scruff and tell you what you don’t want to hear, and—in the next breath—what you need to hear," says a new Gwarlingo review. In these "searing, courageous" poems which are "part persona, part personal narrative . . . Brown writes a vivid portrait of a woman who never really learned to read or write— the two things to thumb through in Fanny’s house were the Bible...

We are pleased to announce that Derrick Austin is the winner of the 14th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for his collection Trouble the Water! The collection was selected from nearly 500 manuscript submissions by National Book Award-winning poet Mary Szybist. Austin will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in spring 2016 within the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America series. Of the winning collection, Mary Szybist says, “‘Expect poison of the standing water,’ Blake warned, highlighting the dangers of imaginative stagnation. I’m now tempted to believe that Blake himself has sent us...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_7caUiJLzk&feature=youtu.be (Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs read from their new books at Iowa City's Prairie Lights Bookstore | Video courtesy of Poets & Writers) In a recent Arkansas Times interview with BOA's Nickole Brown (Fanny Says, 2015), and her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, the poetry power couple discuss "their books, their writing lives, and the future." Both of them women, writers, and professors of writing, Brown and Jacobs dive into their shared creative experience of the difficulties they face writing during the semester: "As a professor, my first obligation is to my students," says Brown, "and if I give them what...

Nickole Brown's new collection Fanny Says, has been bright in the recent spotlight, and for good reason. Receiving a starred review from Library Journal, Brown's second collection "tells the story, without sentimentality or cliché, of her grandmother Fanny," and does so "in a voice that is both authentic and colloquial." "At the heart of these lyric hybrids (epistolaries, monologs, and other poetic celebrations) is language, the language of communication, the language of shared heritage," says Library Journal.  "These are poems of survival—and sometimes advice. It’s rare to find a book of poems that reads like a well-plotted page-turner, each poem...