Help Us Stay Paywall-Free
Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.
Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.
Boston Review’s Arts in Society section publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and criticism. It focuses on how the arts loosen the hold of convention, bear witness to injustice, provoke new ways of seeing the world, and speak to the most pressing political and civic concerns of our time.
Criticism, Poem, Memoir, Short Story
An interview with Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof about his latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
“There is no plot; it’s just Black people living their lives with other Black people on their own planet.”
My dead mother called me to say she knew she killed me a long time ago but look how well I’m doing now.
Death was all around him. Maybe you know what this is like, hearing music overlaid with rain. They stop competing after a while.
Don’t stuff your fingers
in your ears or count the Pentecost.
Don’t ask if that grammar has a rosary
or recipe written in cornrows on her head.
Before I left him /
on his deathbed, my father used to say
the ice is breathing: this quivering song
of things once-broken, mending. /
This song of them breaking again.
You can say my mother didn’t know jack
about no line breaks, but she’ll tell you
that one thing leads to another; and violence
and love can happen all at once.
In the parallel world in which gesture is followed /
by recompense
Teachers told him it was unlikely a child could slip or tumble from that great a height without pushing or prompting. Impossible, they meant to say.
“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”
I once wrote letters to a prisoner at Guantánamo. The letters always came back / opened.
Pitchfork is dead, but good reviewing doesn’t have to die with it.
The first capturing your gaze into nowhere
the other when you covered your face with your hands
so you were not anonymous, only unseen
On the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s posthumously published novel, Until August.
Bertrand Tavernier’s daring documentary about the Algerian revolution sought to break the silence in France.
An interview with poet Fady Joudah about writing his latest collection, [...], amid war in Gaza.
From time to time, language dies. / It is dying now. / Who is alive to speak it?
We rely on contributions from readers to keep our pages free and open for everyone. Become a supporting reader today.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975.
Registered 501(c)(3) organization.
This is a perilous moment for independent media. As a small nonprofit—with no sponsor or endowment—we rely on the generosity of readers to support our work.
Will you please consider making a tax-deductible donation today?
Every contribution helps pay our writers and sustain our website—always free to read for everyone, since you can’t build a more just world behind paywalls.
This is a perilous moment for independent media. As a small nonprofit—with no sponsor or endowment—we rely on the generosity of readers to support our work.
Will you please consider making a tax-deductible donation today?
Every contribution helps pay our writers and sustain our website—always free to read for everyone, since you can’t build a more just world behind paywalls.