BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_395" align="alignleft" width="180" caption="Beats at Naropa reviewed by BOA Editor Peter Conners"][/caption] BOA Editors Thom Ward and Peter Conners are both active in the literary community - teaching, giving talks, writing and publishing their own work, and reviewing books by non-BOA authors. The current issue of Rain Taxi on-line features a review of Beats at Naropa: An Anthology (Coffee House Press, 2009) by Peter Conners wherein Conners says things like: "As paterfamilias of the school, Ginsberg gets his say throughout this collection, as does its presiding spirit Anne Waldman, who co-edited the book with librarian and Naropa alumna Laura...

[caption id="attachment_373" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Sharon Bryan. BOA poet."][/caption] Gently Read Literature has emerged as one of those increasingly rare breeds - an intelligent review publication that takes the time to publish in-depth, comprehensive reviews of poetry and fiction. It doesn't matter whether a publication is online or in-print, any venue publishing thoughtful reviews these days should be celebrated and supported. We're thrilled to have Sharon Bryan's Sharp Stars (winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2009) reviewed by J. Michael Wahlgren for the current issue of Gently Read Literature. The review starts: "In Sharp Stars, Sharon Bryan is concerned...

[caption id="attachment_340" align="alignleft" width="118" caption="The Boatloads"][/caption] BOA is back from holiday break & ready to zoom into the new year! Wonderful to come back to find a sharp review of The Boatloads from Galatea Resurrects: "With an irreverence bordering on blasphemy ('We want to find a higher intent/ a god to damn'), and a connectedness to the natural world rivaling none, Albergotti’s debut is a charged pastiche of imaginative genius, fiercely broken chips of song, and a strange peacefulness borne of surviving a treacherous journey only to find oneself washed up on foreign, or, with any luck, domestic shores." Read...

[caption id="attachment_331" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Charles Simic, BOA translator, with Novica Tadic, BOA author."][/caption] Another smart review from Verse! Follow the below link to read Timothy Henry's insightful review of Dark Things, poems by Novica Tadic, translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic, in which Henry says things like: "In his introduction to Novica Tadic's Dark Things, Charles Simic suggests that the reader of this haunted collection is led by “a nameless recluse, mistrustful and fearful . . . surrounded on all sides by monsters and apparitions generated by his vivid, guilt-ridden imagination.” With the guidance of this recluse, we are...

[caption id="attachment_302" align="alignleft" width="201" caption="On the Winding Stair. Stories by Joanna Howard."][/caption] While we're talking about On the Winding Stair... here's another new review by John Madera for The Brooklyn Rail. Here's a taste - you can follow the below link for the complete review: "Joanna Howard’s lapidary debut On the Winding Stair is an escalier spiraling with brocaded lyricism, alternately swathed in darkness and bathed in phosphorescence. Metaphysical spaces coexist with vivid corporeality in a place where words aren’t so much modified as they are baroquely embellished, cast in irreality; we have, as in “Ghosts and Lovers,” “[t]he fantastic,...