BOA Blog

The Brooklyn Rail considers the work of one of its Brooklyn citizens, Craig Morgan Teicher, in this review of Craig's new collection, Cradle Book:  "Cradle Book is described as a series of fairytales.  But Craig Morgan Teicher’s second collection of poems is more precisely described as a series of aphorisms and parables—paeans, all, to our soul-stealing world.   With grim aplomb, Teicher sets about his task, constructing single-page tales that seemingly pre-date contemporary notions of narrative." Read the rest of the review here [Brooklyn Rail review of Cradle Book]

[caption id="attachment_448" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Carpathia by Cecilia Woloch"][/caption] Cecilia Woloch's collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succumbs to loss, where "fat bees [fall] into the wine" and the ghost swans have "wings of death."  The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I've seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up...

[caption id="attachment_849" align="alignleft" width="167" caption="Craig Morgan Teicher's "Cradle Book""][/caption] Library Journal, the publication of record for librarians across the country, says this of Cradle Book by Craig Morgan Teicher. What say you? Perhaps it's because morals sound archaic to the modern ear that anything that ends in one strikes us as less a story than an artifact. With this varied collection of short prose pieces, Teicher (Brenda Is in the Room & Other Poems) works at some remove from the traditional fable while forfeiting none of the surprise and humor that are part of the genre. While Teicher cops many...

"[Beautiful in the Mouth is] the most unique and startling book I’ve read in a long time..." What else did they say? Find out here: [Devil's Lake Review of Beautiful in the Mouth]

Beautiful in the Mouth. BOA, dist. by Consortium. 2010. c.96p. ISBN 978-1-934414-33-0. pap. $16. POETRY [caption id="attachment_847" align="alignleft" width="167" caption="Keetje Kuipers' "Beautiful in the Mouth""][/caption] Kuipers, Keetje.   In her debut collection, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Kuipers untangles the interwoven discourse between life’s richness and barrenness, its fullness and hollowness. Daily experiences fuel her poems, providing lavish, sensual images rife with exuberant details. Though the concise language sometimes becomes sentimental—“no one/ was coming to give me what I/ needed, but I lay down and waited/ anyway”—the poet ultimately turns what seems to be a standard prose...