Recent Blog Posts
BOA Editions Intern Reviews: Pluck by Hannah Kailburn
What happens when we outgrow the doctrine that forged us, and was once our lifeforce, as crucial to our survival as the air we breathe? When we must lift the pure white vestment from our shoulders and pack it away in a forgotten place, because the weight of an imperfect faith is too much to bear, but all we can offer in this chaotic modern world? Pluck, by Adam Hughes, is a tether through the darkness to those of us who have shared in sleepless nights spent kneeling on the hard floor of a dark room, beseeching a god with ever-watchful...
BOA Intern Reviews: THE MUSEUM OF FUTURE MISTAKES by James R. Gapinski
If someone told you loving something, or someone, was a mistake, would you still let yourself feel it? Or would the suggestion eat you and your relationship alive? How far would you go to keep the one you love close? What if you were falling, falling, falling with no end in sight? Boa author James R. Gapinski (they/them) takes us on a macabre and witty journey into exploring these questions and more in his short fiction collection, The Museum of Future Mistakes. Haunted fingernails, egg-laying cats, and magicians sawing themselves in half are just a few of the twisted and...
Encore: Keetje Kuipers on her poetics of humility, the danger in love poems about marriage, and bumping around in the dark
Click to listen to the interview on Minnesota Public Radio The Write Question-Interview with Keetje Kuipers
Introducing Evie Shockley 2025-2026 Blessing the Boats Editor-at- Large
Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.
Michelle Phuong Ho Chosen as Next Blessing the Boats Selection
BOA is proud to announce that Bone Symphony by Michelle Phuong Ho of New Haven, Connecticut has been selected as the Blessing the Boats Selection by 2024 Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Bone Symphony will be published in the fall of 2026. Bone Symphony mines the wreckage left by centuries of colonialism and imperialist warfare in Vietnam and reassembles the bones—testimonies from re-education camps, classifieds written by former boat people, toxic residue left by Agent Orange, a poem written from one side of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, memories inherited from elders, drawings by the author, and more. Michelle Phuong Ho is a poet...