Theme and Invariants

June 10, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

So you see I’ve begun looking after you

looking for you

looking for you, who would not see
as relentlessly as I did
what we both meant
to end

So that you see just as long as you’re made
to listen
to this lyre’s
sedulous strain

Whose head severed in the river-current,
unlooked-at & still singing
all its way downstream to Lesbos

Not stopped looking after
you’d already begun to look twice
in every direction but ours

So I turned back too, back to
what we’d both been looking
away from, looking
for

looking after, in this
aftermath of whatever
we end up calling
what we ended

So you see
I’ve begun
relooking
so that you see

(pluck and pluck of the lyre)

So you see I’ve begun
again
(silt
under the eyelids,
silt on the singing tongue)

looking after you

by Bruce Beasley

The Poetry Centre hosted a special performance poetry event last year, and the video of the show is now available on YouTube! Watch it here, and enjoy sampling the talents of some of the finest Oxford poets.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia is the latest volume in his ongoing spiritual meditation, which forms a kind of postmodern devotional poetry in a reinvention of the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. The book is structured around a series of poems called ‘Pilgrim’s Deviations’ and it forms a deviating pilgrimage through science, history, politics, and popular culture. Beasley interrogates the theological, metaphysical, scientific, and political worlds of our time in a continually disrupted catechism, a ‘catechismus interruptus.’

Bruce Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and studied at Oberlin College (B.A., 1980), Columbia University (M.F.A., 1982), and the University of Virginia (Ph.D., 1993). He is the author of six previous collections of poems, including The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007), Lord Brain (winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award, 2005), and Summer Mystagogia, selected by Charles Wright for the 1996 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust and three Pushcart prizes, and his work appears in The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife the poet and nonfiction writer Suzanne Paola and their son Jin, and is a professor of English at Western Washington University. His latest collection Theophobia (BOA, 2012) is now available at BOA’s site here, where you can also read another poem from the collection, ‘From “Having Read the Holy Spirit’s Wikipedia”‘. You can also find out more about Bruce Beasley’s work from his website.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and like BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Prince of Rivers

February 25, 2013April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In the land of rivers I was the prince of rivers.
In the land of houses I lived in a thousand houses.
In the land of scattered bones my bones were scattered

by worshipful princes who carried each one like a scepter.
I was there and a breeze eddied around me.
In the land of questions I was the subject of questions.

I’m sorry what was lost was found utterly changed.
I could see through the sky and bring down the lonely stars.
When I was happy, lambs were born. They stood up

enacting their first dance of balance. In the land of frost
I was never cold. A warm breeze eddied around me.
When I thundered the sky tore like paper. Beyond the sky

the sky tore and rain fell into the moon’s dark holes.
In the land of eagles I received messages from eagles.
I’m sorry the moon is a fake gray plate. I’m sorry the day

is so dark. In the land of the future I saw men of stone.
When I was sad all the seas swelled. The islands
were swallowed and forgotten; books were drenched and forgotten.

When I was old my hair was as long as my story.
I’m sorry the branch bearing fruit is so high.
When I was young trees arched toward me like I was the sun.

I’m sorry the dead are quiet as ash. I’m sorry what’s left is so cold.
I knew I could escape through a hole in the sky. Wherever
I wept thick stalks grew. I knew I could weep for a long time to come.

by Craig Morgan Teicher

Notes from BOA Editions:

Inspired by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Craig Morgan Teicher’s To Keep Love Blurry is an exploration of the charged and troubled spaces between intimately connected people: husbands and wives, parents and children, writers and readers. These poems include sonnets, villanelles, and long poems, as well as two poetic prose pieces, all meditating on the relationship between truth and art. As a son becomes a husband and then a father, Teicher expertly probes a life recast as poetry, with poems that long to leap into the lives of their subjects.

Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, freelance writer, and poetry editor and director of digital operations at Publishers Weekly. His first book of poems, Brenda Is In The Room And Other Poems, was chosen by Paul Hoover as winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry and was published by the Center for Literary Publishing. Cradle Book (BOA, 2010) was his first collection of short stories and fables. You can read another selection from Teicher’s latest collection of poetry, To Keep Love Blurry, at BOA’s website here, learn more about Teicher from his website, follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and watch him read from his work in these YouTube videos.

My Friend Mary Stone From Oxford Mississippi

December 10, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We know we ought to be enemies,
her voice perhaps,
thirty three years off the Delta and
still caked in mud or
my hair perhaps,
bushed for the warrior women of Dahomey,
we know we ought to be enemies, only
Oh Mr. Faulkner
to prevail is such an awe full responsibility
to “have a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and
endurance”
is an awe full responsibility but
we know we have to try it and
we are both trying to try it
we
red as the clay hills and blacker than loam
friends.

by Lucille Clifton

Notes from BOA Editions:

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was the 2007 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as the 2010 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Her final poetry collection, Voices, was published by BOA in September 2008. She was an award-winning poet, fiction writer, and author of children’s books. Her poetry book, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000, won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton‘s BOA poetry collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, and, Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, the only author ever to have achieved this, while The Terrible Stories was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Clifton received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; the Shelley Memorial Prize; and the Charity Randall Citation. She served as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. You can find out more about the recent Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 here, where you can also read a further poem from the book. Watch a Lucille Clifton playlist, curated by BOA Editions, at this link.

The mushrooms are born in silence

October 22, 2012April 11, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

The mushrooms are born in silence; some are born in silence; others, with a brief shriek, a bit of thunder. Some are white, others pink, that one’s gray and looks like a dove, the statue of a dove; some are gold or purple. Each one bears—and this is the horrible part—the initials of the dead person from which it springs. I don’t dare devour them; that tender flesh is our relative.
But in the afternoon the mushroom buyer comes and starts to pick them. My mother lets him. He chooses like an eagle. That one, white as sugar, a pink one, a gray one.
Mama doesn’t realize she’s selling her own kind.

by Marosa di Giorgio

Notes from BOA Editions:

Marosa di Giorgio has one of the most distinct and recognizable voices in Latin American poetry. Her surreal and fable-like prose poems invite comparison to Kafka, Cortázar, and even contemporary American poets Russell Edson and Charles Simic; but di Giorgio’s voice, imagery, and themes—childhood, the Uruguayan countryside, a perception of the sacred—are her own. Previously written off as ‘the mad woman of Uruguayan letters’, di Giorgio’s reputation has blossomed in recent years. You can find out more about Marosa di Giorgio from her official website (in Spanish – or in English with the help of Google Translate!) here, and from BOA’s page here.

Protest

September 3, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There is a way to drop a body atop a hard mattress,
to scrub gentle parts too hard, yank a gown
across withered flesh, to drag a weight smaller
than your own and slam it against a pillow.
There are ways to say the night is long
and there are twenty other beds to check.

There are ways to ignore chapping lips,
not to hear a rasping voice, to avoid the task
of filling a water pitcher. There are ways
to tell them, without using words, that you hate
the job, ways to leave them cold and shivering
and naked. There are ways to leave them alone.

But they had an answer, the ones we cleaned
and dressed and moved and fed and watched
over. On chair, bed, pillow, gown, on sheet,
diaper, floor, and shoe, writ repeatedly
in stinking letters: No, I am not dead.

by Janice N. Harrington

Notes from BOA Editions:

Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children’s books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Hands of Strangers portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers. What does it mean to be a nurses’ aide in a nursing home, the lowest of the low, the typically-female worker who provides physical care for the devalued bodies of the elderly? What is it to live one’s remaining life on a county ward as an indigent elder? You can find out more about the book at BOA’s website here. Read more about Janice N. Harrington’s work and hear her read from it on her website here.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Photography

August 13, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

At the photographer’s, you can get a portrait of your likeness after death, but the process is painstaking. A newly engaged couple once proved so hard to satisfy, the photographer had to continue the shoot the following day. Finally, at closing time he’d managed to position them, and the light, the mark of such photography, was also perfect. He turned off the lamps, locked up the shop, and left the couple to stand in the studio overnight. ‘I love you,’ whispered the girl in almost total darkness. Only a thin streak of light from the street lamps pierced the studio from the store front. ‘I love you too,’ replied her fiancé, ‘but stand still now and look right into the camera.’

by Carsten René Nielsen

‘Photography’ is copyright © Carsten René Nielsen, 2011. It is reprinted from House Inspections (BOA Editions, 2011), which was translated with an Introduction by David Keplinger and published by BOA Editions in 2011.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Born in 1966, Carsten René Nielsen is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Enogfyrre dyr (2005) and Husundersøgelser (2008). His book of selected prose poems, The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors, was published in English by New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2007. His poetry has been featured in magazines in Italy, Germany, Canada, and the US. Nielsen lives in Aarhus, in Denmark. You can read more about Carsten René Nielsen at his website here, and find him on Facebook here.

David Keplinger, the translator of Nielsen’s work, has won a number of awards including the Colorado Book Award, Truman State University’s T.S. Eliot Prize, a NEA fellowship, and grants from the Danish Arts Council. He directs the MFA Program at American University in Washington, D.C. Find out more about him on this page.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

The Fact Remains

July 23, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I’m heavier than some animals, lighter than others. Also, I’m more threatening than most animals, less threatening than a few; faster than some, slower than most. I don’t bite, though, unless provoked by desire. What I want to say is: I still measure distance in years. And swans mate for life. At least that’s what I believe. I want a pair of somethings to refer to when I’m trying to make a point. The point is this: I’m an animal who knows where he stands among other animals. I can outrun a snail and threaten a housefly. I can conquer an anthill and mate for life. But the fact remains: My favorite dog has bitten the entire neighborhood. Here, boy, I say, but he ignores me, intent on running down another frightened child on a bicycle. He’s mangy too. His collar’s too tight, and there’s no quenching his thirst. Raw meat’s the answer, but I’m too lazy to go to the store. This is the story of a boy and his dog. Though as far as I can tell, the dog ran off a long time ago.

by Christopher Kennedy

The latest Poetry Centre podcast, a discussion featuring Kate Clanchy, Jane Yeh, and Sophie Mayer which was chaired by Alex Pryce, is now available. Recorded at a recent symposium entitled ‘Sisters in Verse’, the debate examined the place of women within contemporary poetry and whether poetry itself is a gendered field. You can listen to the audio here, and your comments are welcome via our Facebook page, via Twitter (@brookespoetry), or via the website.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Christopher Kennedy grew up in a working-class suburb of Syracuse, New York. He received a B.A. in English from LeMoyne College and a M.A. in Creative Writing/English from Syracuse University where he is currently the Director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. He is the author of three poetry collections, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd.), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2007, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press). His work has appeared in many print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, Slope, Mississippi Review, and McSweeney’s. He is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

The poems in Ennui Prophet, Christopher Kennedy’s fourth collection, range from deeply personal explorations of relationships with family and friends to examinations of the political climate in the first decade of the millennium. Whether personal or public, Kennedy gazes through a slightly distorted lens to better see the world around us. The novelist Dave Eggers has written that Kennedy’s work is ‘[s]ingular and deeply pleasurable. Christopher Kennedy’s prosetry is a lonely anarchic nation-state unto itself, half vacation funspot, half eerie purgatorial layover.’ You can sample a playlist that Christopher Kennedy put together to accompany his book at the Largehearted Boy music blog.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

June 18, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Your father steps on board the train of ghosts.
You watch him from the platform:

somehow, he doesn’t look as old
as you expected him to be.

You think this must have something to do
with the light, or maybe

how much bigger the train is.
It stretches down the track
a long way, as far as your eyes can make out.

It’s like a black bullet
that keeps speeding toward you,
you think, and then:

No, it’s like a very long train, that’s all.

Somewhere on board the train, your father
is choosing a seat. Maybe

he’s already found one, has settled in,

picked up a magazine or newspaper
someone else left lying there,

is flipping through it, idly.
Maybe he’s looking out the window, for you
you would like to think, waving,

only you’ll never see it
because of the reflected glare.

Or maybe he’s not looking for you at all.
Maybe he’s watching the hot-air balloons
that have just appeared

all over the sky, ribbed like airborne hearts
of the giants Jack killed.

In the stories, Jack has no father.
This would explain a lot, you are thinking

as the train begins to pull away:

his misplaced affections,
stealing the harp of gold that played
all by itself. Around you,

men and women and children
are standing on the platform, shouting, waving,
hugging themselves.
The wind is cold; it must be March.

You would want that kind of music
if you were Jack, wouldn’t you?

by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher

‘Your Father on the Train of Ghosts’ is copyright © G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher, 2011. It is the title poem from Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, which was co-written by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher and published by BOA Editions in 2011.

Notes from BOA Editions:

G.C. Waldrep was born in the small town of South Boston, Va., in 1968, and currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He holds degrees in American history from Harvard and Duke and a MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. He teaches at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. John Gallaher’s previous collections of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses (2007), winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, and Map of the Folded World (2009). His work has appeared in such journals as Field, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2008. In 2010, he won the Boston Review poetry prize. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review, and, with Mary Biddinger, the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third ‘voice’ emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own. The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time. You can find out more about Your Father on the Train of Ghosts by visiting BOA’s website here and hear John Gallaher read the poem here.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Small Sorrows

April 30, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You can start anywhere,
you can start with the hummingbird
that quivers at the feeder, or with a moon
lost in the corner, or the stray dog who creeps
to my window and breathes. But not with
the Lebanese woman on TV who sobs as she
trudges back to her house of rubble.

How can I tell you my small sorrows?
In Slovenia, at the Nazi prison in Begunje,
you can see the last writing of two British
soldiers. On the stone of a shared cell, each
scraped the facts he pared himself down to:
name, address, parents, schools, date of enlistment,
rank, battalion, date and place taken prisoner, and
the date which became the year of death.

I didn’t want to start there.
I don’t want to end there. But no matter where I start,
or end, I will tell you—that if I could
touch you, I would become a hummingbird, a hidden,
shining center. And the dog—she would
press her small, strong back into my hip.

by Deborah Brown

Poetry Centre announcements: Two poets based at Oxford Brookes, Steven Matthews and Claire Cox, have written poems in response to photographs by a Brookes colleague, Sabine Chaouche. The opening of the exhibition, ‘Poetry of Forms, Forms of Poetry’, is on Thursday 3 May from 12-1pm in the Tonge Building, Oxford Brookes University, Headington, Oxford. All are welcome.

On Friday 4 May, the Poetry Centre launches its monthly podcast. The first episode features local poet Claire Cox, who reads and discusses her poem ‘Tolstoy at Astapovo Station’. You will be able to listen to the podcast via the Poetry Centre website, or download it from iTunes.

‘Small Sorrows’ is copyright © Deborah Brown, 2011. It is reprinted by permission of BOA Editions from Deborah Brown’s book Walking the Dog’s Shadow, which was selected by Tony Hoagland as the 2010 winner of BOA’s annual A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and published by BOA in 2011. Together with another BOA poet, Michael Waters, whose work we featured on 24 October, Deborah Brown was recently announced as a Pushcart Prize winner, with the title poem from her collection selected to appear in the Pushcart Prize anthology, due out in November.

Notes from BOA Editions:

Deborah Brown was co-editor, with Maxine Kumin and Annie Finch, of Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics, and co-translator, with Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas, of The Last Voyage: Selected Poems by Giovanni Pascoli (Red Hen Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Margie, Rattle, The Alaska Quarterly, Stand, The Mississippi Review, and others. Brown teaches literature and writing at the University of New Hampshire-Manchester, where she won an award for Excellence in Teaching. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire, with her husband, George Brown, and four cats. You can read two further poems by Deborah Brown at ConnotationPress.com.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.

Moment

March 19, 2012April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

To the woman who handed over
a folded note, I have enough time
—on a thin slip of pinkish paper,
no name or address—you’re first
in mind this January 1.
Where did we meet?
You smiled shyly, stepped away.
Do you pass that note often?
Was it a singular moment?
Maybe you’re a friend dropping lines
when you detect a listener.
And what am I?
There’s a fine soup
to be made of every minute.
A way to stand and stir
so no one catches what you’re doing.
And there’s a sea of gloom
so close under the skin
that loves the taunt of a crisp new year.
Here, this fresh morning
and every to follow,
cabinet of stacked white
bowls, shines wide and plenty.
Each square of calendar
opens its hungry mouth.

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Notes from BOA Editions:

Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, essayist, anthologist, has been a recipient of writing fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Witter Bynner Foundation/Library of Congress. Author or editor of more than thirty volumes, her most recent collection of poems, Transfer, was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in September of 2011, and is a Finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award (more details here). She has read her work on National Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion. Poetry editor for The Texas Observer, Nye has worked as a visiting writer in schools at all educational levels. She is currently serving on the Board of Chancellors for the Academy of American Poets. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

You can read another poem from the collection here, learn more about Nye’s work in a 2002 interview with PBS host Bill Moyers at this link, and watch her read her found poem ‘One Boy Told Me’ here.

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. In 2011, BOA celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here. You can also sign up for the publisher’s newsletter here, find and ‘like’ BOA on Facebook, and follow the publisher on Twitter by searching for @boaeditions.