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Each day this month we are highlighting an independent publisher worthy – and always worthier – of greater notice. Admittedly, this entry may read as more of an endorsement of the work of Joanna Howard than of BOA Editions, and therefore I seek, first and foremost, to assure you that this is not entirely the case; that, rather, as it was through Howard’s work that I became acquainted with that of BOA, I find it fitting to first address Howard’s prose and then trace the trail it lay leading up to BOA’s formidable doorstep.
I first became aware of Howard’s work a little over a year ago, when she gave a reading of one-half of one of her stories. It was an utterly enrapturing performance, and it is available to listen to online: please click here to do so. I remember being overwhelmed by the peculiar sensuality of her prose, by the ethereal glow and levity of her words even as they described the most tactile of subjects and caroled with the campiest of genres. The experience was new and thrilling: I laughed without quite knowing, moments after each outbreak, what I had just laughed about; her story had an aloof poignancy that I felt unable to get a grip on, even as it left me feeling weighty-chested and brokenhearted. It was at once quietly visceral and bombastically literal; it is the kind of writing that invites seemingly contradictory "at once" qualifications. The emotional space it now occupies in my mind is much like that of memories I can’t quite precisely place even as I can feel them with intense acuity. And while, indeed, much of this initial experience may lay in her particular reading style – affable, self-possessed, somewhat timid –, this sensation is essential to her prose, whether on the page, in the ear, or replayed in the mind. Her recent collection of short stories, On the Winding Stair, was published by BOA, and their website extracts from it a lovely story called "Exchange," excerpted here:
The glass lantern is fractured. It’s time to start slowly.
She wore a cloisonné earring in the shape of a fish. Harry James was playing on the Victrola. He spoke at the bar, softly, so as not to interrupt. The gentleman across from him was a confused type.
My mother and father were brother and sister, the gentleman told him.
He agreed and excused himself.
She slipped about the room like walking on petals on pillows on air. He approached her.
Please, she said. I’m guilty enough just standing here.
He had his answer, and still it seemed he’d heard the song before.
It is funny and fun and pithy and smart, and it’s difficult to quite make heads or tails of it. Her prose escapes easy grasp, and demands the reader’s participation in a manner I have never before come across: it does not leave distinct holes to be filled in, or inclusively invite limitless interpretation; rather, it seems to strive for a cohesion and articulation that just cannot come entirely across, but it has definite, if distant, boundaries within the distinct logic that undergirds its characters' and situations' existences. It is like listening to a friend after an insuperable many years’ separation, or catching a cross-table conversation in a comprehensible dialect that you cannot yourself speak: like Norwegian to Swedes. Before I become too lost in rapture over her unique abilities, I should move on – as per this month’s focus – to our fourth independent publisher of note: BOA Editions; but, should anyone like to read another story of hers, I am here including a link to the marvelous "Seascape," which was published in Harp & Altar.
BOA, then, and finally, and hopefully not too late: I was led to it, quite simply and utilitarianly, as it is the publisher of On the Winding Stair; it had merely provided to lazy me a means of locating Howard's work. When, while working in a rare books library – one of the few places, unfortunately, in which one may easily find their titles –, I realized that BOA had published much of the work of W.D. Snodgrass – one of my favorite writers, and certainly the one whose mucosal name I envy the most –, I was struck by a much-belated desire to get to know them more. I soon after picked up Carolyn Kizer’s poetry collection Yin and was hooked. Primarily known as a publisher of poetry, BOA has released works by such poets as Lucille Clifton, Russell Edson, Kazim Ali, and Wyn Cooper, among many others; in 2007, they began publishing works of prose, as well, including that of the lively and precise Martha Ronk and the utterly charming and unexpected Daniel Grandbois. Their catalogue is immense and their integrity unimpeachable, and a good many years could be happily and rewardingly put to making one’s way through exclusively their titles, something that, for obvious reasons, does not usually make for a wise recommendation. But they and the writers they have published are all immensely brave, probing, challenging, and fun; they make me excited to discover my own unthinking limitations.
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