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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.
Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned but ancestors to be cared for.
Generative AI has made it possible to create lifelike models of real people. Should we?
most days, during some mid-day hour, / I close my eyes and say the Sh’ma. / But it’s always the wrong time of day, / and it’s the only prayer I know
A long line of films tracks the solidarities that arise when prohibition makes friendship too perilous.
She described their world at last in a language that they recognized as true.
Chantal Johnson’s debut novel, Post-Traumatic, makes the case that we can—by moving away from representations of individual suffering.
It’s a thing about being a man. To be so stingy, to deny even a sip of yourself. To deny and deny and deny until one day it all comes out as a violence, like water spewing forth from a hose.
When you weren’t sure if a guy was gay, you asked if he was Canadian. The straight ones always look puzzled, and told you they were American.
We knew language better than anybody, how you could crack it out of fortune cookies or loop it into a rhythm or rip it to shreds and make money off the confetti.
a presenter / interrupts a program to break the news of migrants / found dead on the shores of river niger. i look down / the streets through my window.
The novel Kindred reminds us—emphatically, gruesomely—that white supremacy is us too.
My life too has ended
many times over. Now I’m
doing all I can to return
even the long-gone
once knew tenderness.
A finalist for the 2022 Boston Review Aura Estrada Short Story Contest.
“In the East, it is the cow that animalizes the man. Hence, the native occupies this intermediate space between man and beast, which we term ‘savage.’”
it’s happening / again. everything / outside me / get to switching / channels. brown black / carbon black / black cat black
there is nothing but performance; the language that stretches to capture us all
I begin to feel my body rise / and I can believe / in what freedom must feel like.
To not have had the luxury to think “the world is over,” but to feel it instead.
My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.
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Prolific poet and critic, winner of the National Book Award
Novelist, critic, and winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction
Feminist critic, essayist, and memoirist, whose many books include The End of the Novel of Love and Fierce Attachments
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A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
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For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.
