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Forum XXI (Winter 2022)

Repair

This arts anthology explores whether and how we can repair terrible ruptures of political and social life today.

Repair

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.

 


Editors’ Note
Adam McGee, Ed Pavlić, & Ivelisse Rodriguez

 

PART I: REPAIR

Colleen Murphy
We cannot simply put the past behind us. The framework of transitional justice offers a promising path forward.
Poetry
Donia Elizabeth Allen
. . . I am nott afrayde of swells that lift mee off my feet, or of a strong undertow
Poetry
Kemi Alabi
our bloom game too strong / altar stays red candle cinnamon-lit sweet flicker cracking into prance
fiction by Emma Dries

Heat Index

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Racial redress should be modeled on the global anticolonial tradition of worldbuilding.
Farah Jasmine Griffin

Toni Morrison’s novels imagine a society governed by an ethic of care, devoted to restoring and repairing those who have been harmed, and giving them the space for transformation.


 

PART II: REVIVE

Poetry
Maya Marshall
An Abortion Ban is a body snatcher, is an ethnic cleansing. The uterus is a cave, is an incubator, is a vault, is a self-destructing bomb, is a thoroughfare.
Poetry
Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi
The therapist says, Picture a bird in your mind What kind of bird is it?
Poetry
Adebe DeRango-Adem

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

fiction by Meredith Talusan

The Kindness Thief

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Randall Horton
Every city I’ve lived in has been filled with racism, whether out in the open or hidden in an invisible dialogue of economics and housing. Birmingham taught me to never question what it meant to be a Black American.
Brian Teare
Narrative medicine claims to champion the experience of patients—but it does so by requiring that the sick “earn” their care by telling a redemptive tale about what is wrong with them.

 

PART III: REPAY

Savonna Johnson

Three Poems

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fiction by Yiru Zhang

Dear Mothers, We Are No Longer Lost

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Poetry
Simone Person

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

Bishakh Som

The Tailor

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aureleo sans

Mamabird

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned but ancestors to be cared for.

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