His poetry publications include The Unwound Clock (1990), History and Promise (1991), Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water (1996), As the Hand, the Glove (2001) and The Next Life (2012).
Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku, a book-length haiku sequence or rensaku that explores the interplay of flora, fauna and human activity on Dublin Bay's Bull Island was published in 2015 by Orange Crate Books.
A Man Is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems was published in 2017, also by Orange Crate Books.
His writers' handbook, The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (2005), is now in its fourth edition while his A Short History of Dublin (2000) is published by Mercier Press.
[4] In 2019, Boran co-edited a volume of poetry with Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi, Writing Home: The New Irish Poets.