A journal of humanity and human experience

Coming up next

Subscribe now to be among the first to get our theme issue on Taking Care, coming this fall.
Join BLR and The Paige Fraser Foundation at the historic New York Academy of Medicine September 18th as we bring our recently created film, Reading the Body: Poetry and Dance on Recovery, to a live audience.
This November, BLR takes to the stage at the legendary Thalia Theater at Symphony Space for a live storytelling event on the theme of “Taking Care,” in collaboration with The Nocturnists.

As featured on NPR's Morning Edition

NPR’s Neda Ulaby reported on BLR‘s 20th Anniversary, featuring BLR Editor Danielle Ofri, along with author Celeste Ng. Long before Celeste Ng reached stratospheric popularity with Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, she was an emerging author, whose story “Girls, at Play” appeared in BLR and then won a Pushcart Prize.

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.”

BLR Off the Page

DISCOVER MORE

Cousin Esther Goes to Chicago 

All that time I’ve been working here, mopping the floors, emptying the trash, washing down rooms, and watching the wet-behind-the-ears young pup doctors learn their business.

Given

This must be the first harvest from our acreage: our young vineyard singing, the plastic, ribbed grow tubes that make little greenhouses for each of the young grape plants catching wind and, like a throat and its vocal chords, producing a note.

Art 

October, a woman and a boy, a tumor/
overtaking his brain, draw pictures/
in the waiting room.

Blind Choreography

They told me that other senses/ 
would rush in. Now the atmosphere/ 
is shredded through trees

Blood/Shed

You know what they say—never trust anything that can bleed for a week without dying.

Off The Page: In Memoriam, Fanny Imlay (1794-1816)

Ingeborg Riedmaier reads “In Memoriam, Fanny Imlay (1794-1816),” a poem by Jason Schneiderman

Still Life 

From the moment my friend George stepped from his loft to his death at the bottom of the building’s elevator shaft, there’s been one thing I can say I’ve known for sure—that love is dangerously overrated.

Six Weeks into Chemotherapy

To be unseen, unprayed for, to be unhugged / in the grocery store and left alone // to select a melon.

Evacuation Instructions

With the fat stripped away, she is her essential self. They don’t tell you how beautiful people can be when they’re dying.

Praise & Recognition