A journal of humanity and human experience

Coming up next

We are currently seeking applicants for the positions of Poetry Editor and Nonfiction Editor.
Subscribe now to and get our latest themed issue on Taking Care.
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2024 BLR Literary Prizes! 

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

A SESTINA OF BAD NEWS

“There are more important things I should be doing at the age of forty-two”/
you say, showing me photos of your daughter in a pink, fluffy tutu and I

Monodrama

the asymmetrically lurching gait/
the austere paradox as of one hand clapping/
a unilateral dialogue.

A Figment of Your Imagination

I am a figment of your imagination. You may laugh skeptically, and I admit there is much that would seem to prove I am anything but…

We Are Afraid

We are afraid/ of junior high school students and the nauseating things / they say among their own kind.

Fast-Thinning Throng

I’m angrily packing to fly to my dying brother. / My husband stands and watches. As a tree / might look at someone, he looks down at me.

Interview: Jack Coulehan

Clinical care provides the subject matter for many of my poems, and some of the themes I explore in them – for example, empathy, compassion, uncertainty, loss, anger, and guilt – have driven a process of self-discovery that I think has made me a better doctor.

On January 24th*

It’s been proven, they say— / the bills like a line of ants, / the glamour of the new year / grown dull like a tin ring

Illness as Muse

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.’’

The James Webb Telescope Detects a Heartbeat

They say the pulses come from a distant galaxy, / an infant cluster in the first moment of birth.

Praise & Recognition