BOA Blog

Reviewer Madeleine Kruhley offers high praise for The Secret of Hoa Sen, written by Nguyen Phan Que Mai and translated by the author and Bruce Weigl, in a recent review by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kruhley endorses Mai's ability to maintain a sense of confidence among the shadow of situation: "While there are dark, gritty elements at play, Que Mai’s work does not lose itself to despair. She crafts subtleties in sentiment without being overly sentimental." This collection of poems is riddled with honest moments, illustrating the intimacy associated with cultural elements of Vietnam, whose "secrets are intrinsic to...

"...somewhere between flash fiction and prose poems and memoirs..." Publishers Weekly can't quite ascribe a genre to Aurelie Sheehan's newest book, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA, October 2013), in this week's fiction reviews. Luckily that isn't essential to enjoying this "Collection of Histories," read as "small moments and objects that capture the essences of larger personal histories--lives made up of motherhood, writing, love friendships, and everything in between." The individual pieces within the book only take one sentence to summarize, but as a whole they function on a deeper, more literal level, actively depicting the process and pieces...

Charleston City Paper recently interviewed BOA poet Jillian Weise on her upcoming collection, The Book of Goodbyes.  Rather than delve into poetic terms and techniques, the interview focuses more on how Weise's external stimuli--geography and a prosthetic--influenced her lines. Elizabeth Pandolfi begins the article by divulging the book's unwritten prequel: "Poetry isn't what took Weise to Argentina originally. She was there thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, which she was using to conduct research on a novel about Charles Darwin. She'd applied to the program after a love affair at the University of Cincinnati, where she was doing doctoral work, ended...

A new review of The Folding Star and Other Poems by Jacek Gutorow featured in Stride Magazine, begins with an excerpt from a letter in which Gutorow reveals his concerns about poetry in translation: "There is something paradoxical about the effects created by poetry in translation. The poets who are deeply immersed in their native language, who are capable of articulating complex meanings connected with innumerable modulations of colloquial speech, and who manage to sound out the unique frequencies of their languages by experimenting with etymology or phraseology, are usually poorly served by translators whose technical abilities may be splendid...

A zealous review for Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia (BOA, 2012)! In a Starred Review by Publishers Weekly this week, Bruce Beasley's newest collection Theophobia (now available at the BOA Bookstore) was highly praised, with claims that the book “outdoes his five prior collections with this spiky, thoughtful, elaborate, sometimes scary, sometimes funny set of verse essays, riffs, and meditations.” Theophobia, the latest of Beasley's postmodern spiritual devotions, is structured around the poetry series, "Pilgrim's Deviations."  PW notes that Beasley “wants answers, from divinity or from DNA, even if he believes that he will not get them, and so his variable, friable,...