Allies

by Ed Pavlic (Editor), Evie Shockley (Editor)

Overview

How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our same hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own?

These are difficult questions to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from renowned writers and newcomers, Allies will offer indispensable insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances—be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)—Allies will be indispensable reading for our times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946511492
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Series:	Boston Review / Forum
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 2.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ed Pavlić is the author of Live at the Bitter End; Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener; Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno; and other books. He is Distinguished Research Professor in the English Department and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.

Evie Schockley is an American poet and author of the poetry collections a half-red sea, the new black and semiautomatic, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She is Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing and author of the novels Dust and The Dragonfly Sea.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden and won the Sillerman First Book Prize for The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the author of three novels and a memoir and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award in 2014, and her previous book, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her novel Sketchtasy, was one of NPR's Best Books of 2018. She lives in Seattle.

Table of Contents

Editors' Note Adam McGee Ed Pavlic Evie Shockley 6

Fiction

Two Sagit Emit, trans Yaron Regev 8

To the Fordham Samuel R. Delany 24

When the Climate Changed Samuel R. Delany 34

All We Remember Will Be Forgotten JR Fenn 44

Mother, Grow My Baby Sabrina Helen Li 62

Chapati Recipe Noel Cheruto 115

Say Something Tananarive Due 139

Poetry

& Christopher Kempf 19

From The Kindreds Meredith Stricker 35

From Mass Extinction Sarah Vap 40

At the Gates, Mikhail Makes Me a Feast of Rain and Dirt Hazem Fahmy 90

Three Poems C. X. Hua 94

Against Travel: A Collaboration Rachel Levitsky Suzanne Goldenberg 111

Activation Instructions // Untitled ₃D Poem Amy Sara Carroll 120

'Alams from the Black Horse Prison, Tripoli, Circa 1981 Khaled Mattawa 169

A Request Tess Liem 188

ETC.

Another Way to Love This World Abdellah Taïa, trans Amanda DeMarco 80

Translation Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 100

A Brief History of the Social Justice Ally Micki McElya 123

The Privilege of the Ally Rigoberto González 133

The Historian and the Revolutionary Walter Johnson Tee Poe Interviewed Mordecai Lyon 150

Solidarity Through Poetry Mark Nowak 160

"We Cannot Be the Same After the Siege" Roderick Ferguson 171

Ally: From Noun to Verb Vijay Yyer Interviewed Robin D. G. Kelley 179

Contributors 190