BOA Blog

In an interview with 3AM Magazine,  Ales Steger, called "simply one of the most enjoyable poets to read in Europe right now," answers questions about his poetic style, his influences, and his titles.  Steger has published 4 books of poetry in the past 15 years, his most recent being The Book of Things. When asked about his style, which is called distinct and exact, Steger responds, "There are different kinds of exactness and different goals that could be acheived through attempts at precision.  Although rational, my poetry is not preoccupied with highlighting exact logical procedures.  Rather, it aims at throwing light at...

On Beloit Poetry Journal Poet's Forum, BOA Author Janice Harrington explains the inspiration behind her piece "Why, Oh Why, the Doily?"  She walks us from her early drafts in 2004 to the "springboard" Selden Rodman provided in Horace Pippen:  A Negro Painter in America. "I knew I wanted a poem that enacted obsession, wanted to crochet a poem (links, chains, intertwining, dropped stitches) that moved from the specifics of family history and memory toward more abstract representations." She then goes on to give an analysis of each section of her work, starting with section one, which "begins with a memory:  a woman crocheting beside the front window of her living room. ...

BOA fiction author Anne Germanacos (In the Time of the Girls) appeared on KPFK, Pacifica Radio for Southern California and you can hear it online here: www.kpfk.org Here's what the station had to say about the show: "8 PM on KPFK, Pacifica Radio for Southern California: The fragmented-seeming narratives written by my guest this week offer at first individual voices and epigrammatic lines suggesting ancient inscription, references to classical mythology. A schematic almost for storytelling itself, bigger stories accumulate and culminate in an adding up of the sum of parts. The individual sections of stories in Anne Germanacos’s In the...

"Society needs art more than art needs society. Art has always existed in nature, no matter what society springs up around it, but it's we who need art to make our lives whole." Matthew Shenoda has published two collections of poetry, Somewhere Else and Season of Lotus, Season of Bone, the latter, published by BOA in 2009. He currently holds two positions within the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. The interview with Caty Gordon from The Minnesota Review, touches on everything from the evidence of Egyptian influence in Shenoda's writing to his passion for Reggae...

We’re glad to see that so many people have enjoyed and re-posted BOA’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize coordinator Albert Abonado’s interview of Sean Thomas Dougherty! Here is Albert’s next installment – an interview with BOA poet Barbara Jane Reyes about her new book Diwata. Barbara’s last book, Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005) won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Diwata was published this month by BOA and has garnered such comments as, “Diwata is a book that would have raised the hairs on the nape of Emily Dickinson’s head” (Nick Carbo), and, “Reyes...