Original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism explore issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal, both political and private.How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own?
These are difficult question to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from both established writers and newcomers, Allies offers unique insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances-be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)-Allies will be essential reading for our times.
Allies is the first publication of Boston Review's newly inaugurated Arts in Society department. A radical revisioning of the magazine's poetry and fiction, the department unites them-along with cultural criticism and belles lettres-into a project that explores how the arts can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our age, from growing inequality to racial and gender regimes, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world.
Fiction
Samuel Delay, Tananarive Due, Catherine Taylor
Poetry
Jane Miller, Ru Puro, Emilia Nielsen, Sarah Vap,Rachel Levitsky, Tess Liem
Interviews
Walter Johnsonand Tef Poe, Robin D. G. KelleyandVijay Iyer
Essays
Roderick Ferguson, Micki McEyla, Mark Nowak, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Abdullah Taia
Author Biography:
Ed Pavlićis the author of Live at the Bitter End; Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener;Let's Let That Are Not Yet- Inferno; and other books. He is Distinguished Research Professor in the English Department and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.
Evie Schockley is an American poet and author of the poetry collections a half-red sea,the new black and semiautomatic, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She is Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing and author of the novels Dust and The Dragonfly Sea.
Ladan Osman is the author ofExiles of Edenand won the Sillerman First Book Prize forThe Kitchen Dweller's Testimony.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the author of three novels and a memoir and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2014, and her previous book, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her novel Sketchtasy, was one of NPR's Best Books of 2018. She lives in Seattle.
