Ed Pavlic – författare

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 Johnson and Tef Poe, Robin D. G. Kelley and Vijay Iyer 

Essays

Roderick Ferguson, Micki McEyla, Mark Nowak, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Abdullah Taïa

It is rare now for people to stay where they were raised, and when we encounter one another—whether in person or, increasingly, online—it is usually in contexts that obscure if not outright hide details about our past. But even in moments of pure self-invention, we are always shaped by the past. In Ancestors, some of today’s most imaginative writers consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others. Are we shaped by grandparents, family, the deep past, political forebears, inherited social and economic circumstances? Can we choose our family, or is blood always thicker? And looking forward, what will it mean to be ancestors ourselves, and how will our descendants remember us?

We bear deep wounds, individually and collectively. All have been worsened by a period of destructive politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, we believe that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal.This anthology draws together a wide range of artists and thinkers, established and emerging. In essays, memoir, poetry, fiction, and comics, contributors explore what it might look like to repair. Topics include the Salem witch trials, climate catastrophe, the January 6 siege of the Capitol, gender identity, the failures (and hope) of Western medicine, and the entwined horrors of racial, sexual, and colonial violence.No single text in this volume offers a definitive answer for what it means to repair. But together, they reveal a promising vision for where to go from here.

How can the speculative imagination help us build a better world?At a world-historical moment of global upheaval, speculative writing is enjoying a renaissance. This collection of poetry, stories, and essays engages speculation as both a ubiquitous feature of financial capitalism and a radical tool of collective imagination. By rejecting dominant ideas about what is possible, speculation empowers us to plot new paths to a more just world.Creative works range over violence and healing, memory and erasure, and alternative worlds, while essays span the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and the ethics of the far future. Taken together, these works suggest that speculation is ultimately about our relationships with each other—as one contributor puts it, “what they have been, what they are, and most important, what they could be.”