BOA Blog

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week, BOA celebrates National Hispanic Heritage Month with a poem from Richard Garcia's The Persistence of Objects. My Mother and Your Mother My mother and your mother drinking tea in heaven—no, not heaven, but that place you go to live after you die and have acquired certain skills.Your mother wants to take my mother to the PX to stock up on Folgers coffee, Ritz crackers, and a couple of cases of gin. My mother wants to go to the new senior...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Chen Chen's Poulin Prize-winning, National Book Award longlisted debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities—on sale now in the BOA Bookstore! If I should die tomorrow, please note that I will miss the particular music of the word "callipygian," which means the having of well-shaped buttocks. I will miss the particular cruelty of tongue twisters in my first tongue: "Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's selections are from Sky Country by Christine Kitano—on sale now in the BOA Bookstore! Sky Country The Korean word for heaven is ha-neul nara, a kenning that translates literally to "sky country." It was a word often used by potential immigrants to describe the United States. 1. My grandmother hoards gold dollar-coins, the heavy discs etched with Sacagawea's over-the-shoulder glance, an infant son tied in a blanket to her back. she doesn't know who Sacagawea is, or Lewis and Clark, or figures...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is a selection from Lighthouse for the Drowning by Jawdat Fakhreddine. A selection from "September" 3. The garden of September comes to me and dozes on my sight, trembling with fatigue in the small sky, that which rapturously glitters on the green leaves, a sky that drags its robe over the trees. September comes to me. I sit up and face it with dreamful things a book, a pack of cigarettes, a cup of tea, and a bit of evening scattered,...

Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis, winner of the 13th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Farmer's Market Sweet Plums: Apology to the Flower Lady We have no issue with her, per se. Guilty, we knew already what we wanted long before we noticed the slow gesture of her fingers: flower to scissors, to vase, to flower again. Her painful carefulness—: that anonymous labor for more beauty qua beauty. She almost convinces us to forget the fruit...