Editor's note / Vijay Iyer Ally: from noun to verb / Sagit Emit - To the Fordham / Samuel R. Delany - When the climate changed/ Samuel R. Delany - All we remember will be forgotten/ JR Fenn - Mother, grow my baby / Sabrina Helen Li - Chapati recipe / Noel Cheruto - Say something / Tananarive Due - & / Christopher Kempf - From: the kindreds / Meredith Stricker - From: Mass extinction / Sarah Vap - At the gates, Mikhail makes me a feast of rain and dirt / Hazem Fahmy - Three poems / C.X. Hua - Against travel: a collaboration / Rachel Levitsky Suzanne Goldenberg - Activation instructions//Untitled 3D poem / Amy Sara Carroll - 'Alams from the Black Horse Prision, Tripolic, circa 1981 / Khaled Mattawa - A request / Tess Liem - Another way to love this world / Abdellah Taïa - Translation / Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore - A brief history of the social justice ally / Micki McElya - The privilege of the ally / Rigoberto González - The historian and the revolutionary / Walter Johnson Tef Poe - Solidarity through poetry / Mark Nowak - "We cannot be the same after the Siege" / Roderick Ferguson - Ally: from noun to verb / Vijay Iyer

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.

Allies is the first publication of Boston Review's newly inaugurated Arts in Society department. A radical revisioning of the magazine's poetry and fiction, the department unites them--along with cultural criticism and belles lettres--under a project that explores how the arts can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our age, from growing inequality to racial and gender regimes, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world. -- Publisher's website