25 years of creative writing on health, illness, and healing

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  • fiction
  • nonfiction
  • poetry
  • Geese

    Geese

    by Grace Glass. “Mornings, Adam struggles up from his dreams to a blinding, ochre-tinged pain that sizzles up his damaged spine, seizes his neck, etches spiteful hieroglyphics into the base of his skull. He can’t help groaning but he does… // continue reading

  • Assisted Living

    Assisted Living

    by Louise Aronson. “Mary’s not at dinner and no one knows why. Roy is limping but at least he’s up walking again after last month when he fell by the mailboxes and dislocated his new knee.” // continue reading

  • Eruv

    Eruv

    by David Milofsky. “Dotty Adams remarked that she hadn’t known there were any Jews in the neighborhood. Some people wondered if the men in long black coats and broad-brimmed hats were Goths, like those boys at Columbine.” // continue reading

  • A Staircase in the Fog

    A Staircase in the Fog

    by Robin Fast. “Beneath this rag-and-bone sky, the only shadow cast is memory. It was wintertime thirty-five years ago when I learned that family afflictions, like weather, come at you from beyond.” // continue reading

  • Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War

    Iambic Pentameter and the Meter of War

    by Diane Cameron. “In the 1940’s, a young Marine returns from China to a small Pennsylvania town. One year later finds the body of the mother-in-law sprawled on the kitchen floor and the body of the wife in the living… // continue reading

  • Illness as Muse

    Illness as Muse

    by Rafael Campo. “It is not unusual, after I’ve given a poetry reading, for some impossibly young writer from the audience to remark over the post-literary pretzels and Diet Coke, “Wow, your stuff is really depressing.’’ // continue reading

  • The Sleepy Beauties of Sound

    The Sleepy Beauties of Sound

    by Jane Wayne. “For now it’s guesswork: a territory / full of unmapped regions, / where paths revert to weeds, and one only advances / by descent – so many steps / from the imagined to the lived.” // continue reading

  • Consumption

    Consumption

    by Rebekah Denison Hewitt. “There were days when death ballooned / like the bloated stomach of a sheep / which lay stiffened in the field.” // continue reading

  • Day 1,301

    Day 1,301

    by Judith Harris. “There will be a worse day. He will live / long enough to not recognize me at all, / and I sense it drawing nearer…” // continue reading

As featured on PBS News Hour’s CANVAS Series

Watch PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown report on BLR’s 25th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri and past BLR writers reflecting on why poetry, storytelling, and writing matter, especially in moments of illness.

Whiting Award Winner

BLR was awarded a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize for “excellence in publishing, advocacy for writers, and a unique contribution to the strength of the overall literary community.”

Praise & Recognition