Poetry

Our weekly Reading Lists compile editors’ selections from Boston Review’s decades-long archive that speak to current affairs and the pressing political, cultural, and intellectual debates of our time.

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Browse our essays and reviews on poetry.

Celebrating National Poetry Month

Ocean Vuong, John Ashbery, Claudia Rankine, and more.

In the Hot Archive

On Lakdhas Wikkramasinha’s vanished histories.

“We Are Neither Prophets nor Mad”

An interview with poet Fady Joudah about writing his latest collection amid war in Gaza.

A Century of Serious Difficulty

Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism a hundred years on.

Rewild Earth

Kemi Alabi’s Against Heaven answers generations of spiritual violence and threatened damnation with reclamation, repopulation, and a redefinition of heaven.

The Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

A recording of our virtual literary event with three generations of Black women writers.

Elegies for Empire

We can find reconciliation and closure in poetry, despite the forces that engender grief and dispossession. Three new poetry collections refuse the binaries and amnesia that so often characterize American mourning.

Everyday Mojo Letters to Yusef

A series of creative reflections on why Yusef Komunyakaa remains one of our greatest living writers and what it means to be a Black Jazz Poet.

Adrienne Rich’s Solitudes

Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.

Queer Shoulders at the Wheel

John Wieners was one of the most important gay poets of his generation.

‘Ancestors’ Contributors Reading

A recording of our digital reading of poetry, fiction, and essays from our annual literary anthology, with ASL interpreting.

Poetry Collection: Award-Winning Poets

The fourth in our series of reading lists to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Poetry in the Critical Zone

In a new book of lyric essays, poet Cole Swensen answers a call issued by theorists Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel: to reimagine the globe in terms of the fragile surface ecosystems that support all life.

Poetry Collection: Uplifting Women’s Voices

The third in our series of reading lists to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Poetry Collection: Empathy

The second in our series of reading lists to celebrate National Poetry Month.

Writing Our Ancestors

A recording of the launch event for Boston Review’s new literary anthology, Ancestors. Renowned writers read their poems, fiction, and more.

Using Formalism to Explore U.S. Systems of Power

Through careful and often irreverent uses of traditional poetic forms, Amit Majmudar offers affecting insights into geopolitics and contemporary life, from the War on Terror to hyperincarceration.

Straight Down to the Bones

Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez discusses the ancestral influences on her work and how art can give us strength.

Ancestral Wealth

The Sacred Black Masculine in My Life

Return to the Gay Underground

On Dennis Cooper’s transgressive fiction about marginalized men.

Witnessing Grace

In Be Holding, celebrated poet Ross Gay interweaves the legacy of one of basketball’s greatest moments with a meditation on Black resilience.

Poet of the Impossible: Paul Celan at 100

Among the most innovative poets of European modernism, he forged a new path for poetry after the terrors of the twentieth century.

When the State Fears a Poet

Celebrated Indian poet and activist Varavara Rao remains in prison on trumped-up conspiracy charges.

The Prophet of the Far Right

Michel Houellebecq’s Islamophobia and chauvinism have made him a favorite intellectual of right extremists. So why does he appeal to so many on the left as well?

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