I ain’t dead and in this form, / I can matrix my way out of your bullet.

“When I flick the light on, my ceiling hangs open, a wide mouth.” After her bedroom springs a leak, an English professor tries to help a struggling student.

From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.

The celebrated novelist treated the past seriously, depicting its psychological complexity and drawing out its present-day political implications.

I was also spat across an ocean

and clung to the edge of an unwilling continent.

“She would sit upright in her bed and recall the moment she saw Aisha’s face.” An Iraqi émigré explains to a New York doctor why she has enrolled in a study for a new antidepressant.

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

I ask my brother if he can hear cicadas where he is. My brother doesn’t know what cicadas are. He is 40 years old. He asks me to repeat it.

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

Cruising extends the political value of the city as a space that brings us into contact with people who seem unlike us until we realize our shared desires.

in your carpeted office you lay my life down / and say open up to that small room in my sternum.

In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.

“I was my father’s son. My father was Nai Nai’s least favorite.” A Taiwanese American man, driven from home by a secret, reevaluates his childhood memories of his grandmother.

a slave ship hauls / bodies as cargo and / both the surface and ocean floor / rifts. even the clouds break / open in sobs.

loving mother, come watch me be patient, / watch how i describe things that never leave my mouth

“Closing her eyes, she pictured Abbie in the funeral home.” Grieving the death of her best friend, a young woman travels to Singapore to stay with an aunt she barely knows.

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

Its illegitimacy goes far beyond the war on drugs.

"Never do unto me what your uncle has done to us." A family member's disappearance leads to personal revelations. 

“My mother has not slept for seven days.” A Taiwanese woman’s brother avoids calling their mother, setting off an insomniac unraveling.

Selected by Sonia Sanchez as a finalist for the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest

“‘No,’ Miho said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t want to share.’” Private tragedy forces a New York woman into attending group addiction therapy sessions.

“I am wearing a fake diamond ring. It cost ten dollars in quarters and lots of concentration.” A mother, her daughter, and her romantic rival try to outmaneuver one another.