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Arts in Society brings our previously siloed poetry and fiction—along with cultural criticism and belles lettres—into a common project. It focuses on how the arts—including the visual arts, theater, dance, and film—can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns, including racism, inequality, poverty, demagoguery, sex- and gender-based violence, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world.
Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits
Two white men carrying briefcases walk in on a congressional meeting held by African leaders dressed in Western attire. Clapping at the president who resembles Léopold Senghor. He uses words like “revolutionary” and “independence” and they garner an applause.
Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.
This is my version of the story, but I will illuminate only a corner of it, one that ran parallel to and underneath it, revealing what was left in its wake.
“Abroadness became my obsession.” When a young Nigerian girl is invited to go live with her uncle in Canada, it sets in motion a peculiar friendship with someone she has long envied.
When you were / in the Everglades we canoed from Flamingo and through the canals.
Look at my heartbeat / and its consequence, / that cup warm on my palm
In her scholarship, mentoring, and activism, Farah Jasmine Griffin brings a praxis of radical love to an unequal academy.
Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism—James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—a hundred years on.
But I do miss the hymns, / the small, hard apples with their dimpled skin. I do miss / things.
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A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
