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Poetry

Arts in Society

Emily Dickinson Escapes

Until recent decades, Dickinson was most often depicted as a sentimental spinster or reclusive eccentric. A new biography and TV show reveal instead a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.

Lynne Feeley

Arts in Society

The Bird at the Window

Since 1970 North America has lost 29 percent of its bird population. New York City alone kills almost a quarter of a million birds each year. More than most people, poets have tried to respond to these unremarked—and mostly preventable—deaths.

Calista McRae

Arts in Society

Herman Melville the Poet

The author of Moby Dick is best known for his novels, but he devoted the second half of his life to writing poetry. What can a new Complete Poems teach us about his place in the canon of American letters?

Gillian Osborne

Arts in Society

Announcing the 2019 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest Winner and Finalists

Congratulations to C. X. Hua!

Boston Review

Arts in Society

The Country Without a Post Office

As news leaks of India’s forced communications blackout in Kashmir, the work of poet Agha Shahid Ali is tragically timely—both its depiction of Kashmiri suffering and the poet’s attempt to imagine a better future for his home.

Manan Kapoor

Arts in Society

Walt Whitman’s Boys

On the poet’s bicentennial, we will see praise for his political idealism and gauzy reclamations of him as an LGBT ancestor. But it remains difficult to talk about the connection he saw between patriotism and his love of young men.

Jeremy Lybarger

Arts in Society

Looking for Solidarity

The work of Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud recalls a time when the two sides of the Caribbean island were united by their visions for an equal society.

Sophie Maríñez

Arts in Society

Announcing Boston Review’s new Arts in Society project

A radical revisioning of our creative writing programs.

Boston Review

Arts in Society, Reading Lists

Writing the Twentieth Century

Poets, philosophers, playwrights. 

Rosie Gillies

Arts in Society

What Nature Online

These poems are urgent calls for rethinking our place on an imperiled planet.

Boston Review

Arts in Society

Should We Talk About the Weather?

A foray into four famous poems.

Tim Wood

Arts in Society

The Unconscious of Earth

Brenda Hillman paves the way for an ecological occult.

Elizabeth Metzger

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