Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Tag: Poetry

Browse our essays and reviews on poetry.

On Lakdhas Wikkramasinha's vanished histories.

Vidyan Ravinthiran

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

Fady Joudah

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

Johanna Winant

From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.

Nojang Khatami

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

Alexis Pauline Gumbs
A recording of our virtual literary event with three generations of Black women writers.
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.
Virginia Konchan

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.

Terrance Hayes

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

Ed Pavlić

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

David Grundy
A recording of our digital reading of poetry, fiction, and essays from our annual literary anthology, with ASL interpreting.
Boston Review
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.
Erika Howsare
A recording of the launch event for Boston Review’s new literary anthology, Ancestors. Renowned writers read their poems, fiction, and more.
Yeoh Jo-Ann, Cheswayo Mphanza, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Sonia Sanchez, Ed Pavlić, Tyehimba Jess, Domenica Ruta, Adam McGee
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.
Calista McRae

In this searching interview, legendary Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez discusses the ancestral influences on her work and how art can give us strength.

Christina Knight, Sonia Sanchez
The Sacred Black Masculine in My Life
Tyehimba Jess

On Dennis Cooper’s transgressive fiction about marginalized men.

David B. Hobbs
In ‘Be Holding,’ celebrated poet Ross Gay interweaves the legacy of one of basketball’s greatest moments with a meditation on Black resilience.
Éric Morales-Franceschini

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

Peter E. Gordon

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

Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla

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?

Martin Gelin

We are teaming up this spring to offer a year of both magazines.

Use code DISSENT when you purchase a print BR membership.

Act fast: offer ends March 31!

Use code DISSENT when you purchase a print BR membership. Offer ends March 31.