BOA Blog

Charles Rafferty is the author of 14 poetry books and chapbooks, most recently The Appendectomy Grin (BOA, 2025), A Cluster of Noisy Planets (BOA, 2021), The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019) Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017). His stories have been collected in Saturday Night at Magellan’s (Fomite Press, 2013) and Somebody Who Knows Somebody (Gold Wake Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Ploughshares; Prairie Schooner; Rhino; and The Southern Review. He has received grants...

The Appendectomy Grin by Charles Rafferty offers a sobering view of our modern world, or more specifically, the ways in which it seems intent on destroying itself. Meditative yet witty, this collection of prose poetry leaves no leaf unturned when discussing the willful separation of humans from nature and our eternal demand that the natural world make space for us. 

Laura Read is the author of The Serious World (Boa Editions, 2025), But She Is Also Jane (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023, winner of the Juniper Prize); Dresses from the Old Country (Boa Editions, 2018); Instructions for my Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Dorianne Laux), and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). Laura has been teaching creative writing, literature, and composition at Spokane Falls Community College since 1998 and poetry in the MFA program at...

Rena J. Mosteirin’s beautiful collection, Disaster Tourism, opens and closes with an alarm, her sharp pen biting for your attention from first page to last. We become tourists to Mosteirin’s world, her unwavering voice taking us on a trip through a series of snapshots of grief, injustice, and our debilitating world from her personal perspective. This triumph of a collection is a must read, its relevancy resolved. These poems serve as accounts of violence, homelessness, and immigration all told from a keen perspective. Mosteirin’s candid and lyrical delivery encourages digestibility, but the heavy is broken up with sweet moments and...

“I was too scared to abandon him altogether, of course. Without him, what was I?” (PLUCK, page 31) The journey from being a believer to questioning is a messy one, and Adam Hughes bares his personal walk through doubt with vulnerability and grace throughout this remarkable collection of poems and prose. Religion and doctrine have a way of latching themselves on to our identity, and when we begin to question, to seek answers, it can feel like the end of the world, the end of us. Who are we without our gods?  I personally have gone through my own story...