For 25 years, Bellevue Literary Review has been publishing stories, essays, and poems that take readers into the shared space where art and medicine meet. Throughout our anniversary year, we’re marking this incredible milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, from the beginning through the present.
Join us each week as we curate special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
About the Issue
Issue 44 featured the 2023 BLR Prizewinners—highlighted below—which were selected by judges Toni Jensen, Phillip B. Williams, and Rana Awdish. Other standouts in this issue include the essay “Mad Love” by Acamea Deadwiler, which became part of her memoir Daddy’s Little Stranger, and the poem “Letter to a Dead Mother” by Martha Silano, who sadly passed away in 2025, a great loss to the literary community.
From the Foreword
In thinking about how to introduce this issue, I couldn’t help but take note of its placement in the BLR canon. This volume, featuring the winners of the eighteenth annual BLR Literary Prizes, comes on the heels of a theme issue on Recovery and before the forthcoming issue on Taking Care. In light of what we have been through—collectively, individually—over the past few years, it’s very likely that many of us are still on a path to recovery, in one fashion or another. And we all can use a bit more care, always.
Literature can help with this healing. That has always been the mission of BLR, to explore life’s shared vulnerabilities through storytelling and poetry. We hope this issue contributes to this ongoing conversation.
– Stacy Bodziak, Managing Editor
Read Highlights from Issue 44
Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, and essay from the featured issue. We encourage you to explore more from the issue on our website or, better yet, to pick up a copy!
In Another Life
2023 Winner, Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
by Lara Palmqvist
The light this morning is almost the same as on the day Nadia thought she was destined to lose Kolya forever. November, trees shedding leaves—that odd inclination to strip layers just before winter’s cold clamp, as though a reminder of how vulnerable humans are in comparison, how fragile and short-lived.
From where she lies in bed Nadia watches Kolya lean against the stained porcelain sink in their flat’s cabinet-sized bathroom, sees him splash cold water on his face until his skin burns pink beneath his dark stubble. Under the flow of water she hears a song in his throat, imagines the vibration beneath the scar on his neck. Where shrapnel once drove just shy of his jugular there is now music, this habit of humming something strange Kolya acquired from the frontlines in Donetsk—one small gain, Nadia supposes, to measure against the loss, a pebble tossed into the void.
Read
You can also read a written interview with Lara that shares more about her prizewinning story and her creative process.
Lost Vessels
2023 Winner, Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
by Jehanne Dubrow
Years ago, I went to an exhibit of ancient ceramics so beautiful that for months after, I dreamed about them. Displayed behind glass, they were of all colors and sizes, decorative and practical, formed on the wheels of Japanese potters across many centuries. I remember a bowl so large it could have been used to bathe a newborn, although its walls were as thin as an April leaf, and the same translucent green. I remember shades of clay layered like earth on earth, and something glazed a cornflower blue, as if blossoms had been turned vitreous and permanent.
But a long time later, when I sought out evidence of what I’d seen—a newspaper article, a photograph perhaps—I couldn’t find the year or the name of the show. Proof of the exhibit seemed to have disappeared. The ceramics existed now only as glistening shapes in my memory. Only in the barely-lighted rooms of imagination, could I open one of the cases and remove a cup, hold its roundness in the curve of my palm and run my finger along its edge.
Read
You can also check out this interview with Sabah Parsa, the Honorable Mention winner in Nonfiction.
Etymology of Chlorophyll
2023 Winner, John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry
by Caroline Harper New
If fingernails could dig you like lichen
from my lexicon. In illness, I lop what is left
of you from my tongue, knowing to eliminate
is to loiter and loiter is in the same language
as love. As laceration. As love. We both used to
say as much though I admit at first
I pretended not to. I love—you lyre?
I love—you lick? I love—you
limp and lily-dark, you lovely
lump. Lewd as lamb.
Issue 44: The Cover
This issue’s cover art is “Flights of Fancy” by Alexander Gorlizki. As part of BLR’s Studio Visits series, BLR editor Danielle Ofri visited Alexander’s studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, to discuss his inspiration and get an inside look at his artwork.