Poetry

Browse our essays and reviews on poetry.

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?

  • Martin Gelin

Solidarity Through Poetry

When Celes Tisdale led poetry workshops at Attica State Prison, soon after the 1971 uprising, some of the prisoners were still recovering from gunshots.

  • Mark Nowak

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

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

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.

  • Gillian Osborne

The Country Without a Post Office

The tragically timely work of poet Agha Shahid Ali and his depiction of Kashmiri suffering.

  • Manan Kapoor

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Walt Whitman’s Boys

What gauzy reclamations of the poet miss at his bicentennial.

  • Jeremy Lybarger

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

Writing the Twentieth Century

Poets, philosophers, and playwrights.

What Nature Online

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

  • Boston Review

Apocalypse

On Frederick Turner’s Epics

  • Robert Crossley

Should We Talk About the Weather?

A Foray into Four Famous Poems

  • Tim Wood

The Unconscious of Earth

Brenda Hillman paves the way for an ecological occult.

  • Elizabeth Metzger

Blockadia

  • Cassandra Cleghorn

Dispatches from the Land of Erasure

Arab American poetry and the work of liberation.

  • Boston Review

Dispatch from the Land of Erasure (I)

Arab American poetry and the work of liberation.

  • Philip Metres

Dispatch in Two Parts: The Arab Body Writes Itself In

Arab American poetry and the work of liberation.

  • Marwa Helal

Fragments of a Song

Arab American poetry and the work of liberation.

  • Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Cartographies of Wind

Arab American poetry and the work of liberation.

  • George Abraham

Instructions for Erasure

Arab American poetry and the work of liberation.

  • Randa Jarrar

A Real American

Arab American poetry and the work of liberation.

  • Farid Matuk

Manacled to a Whelm

Jorie Graham’s Fast marks the fraught presence of an environmentally inclined writer whose most immediate environment, the body, confronts a foreclosed future.

  • Cecily Parks

A Poetics of Ghosting

Aaron Beasley interviews Rodrigo Toscano

  • Rodrigo Toscano
  • Aaron Beasley

National Poetry Month 2018

A poem a day, everyday, in honor of National Poetry Month.

  • Boston Review
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