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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.
My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.
The stones are endlessly weeping in the dark. Or is it
the bird-chatter of rain. O darling, are you writing
another poem about trees? No, not trees but ghosts
that live on trees and their legend of never-let-gos.
The world never really ended. An apocalypse wasn’t an end so much as a change of state, ice into water.
What does it mean for those living in the diaspora to remain attached to the land they left behind?
“I will be a tightrope walker,” she said, “and I will walk across the air to you.”
“Most were drills. Pilots weren’t to know which were the real deal. They were not to think of the lethal effects of their duty.” A pilot is pulled aside by a desperate woman seeking help.
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.
“You can’t go to Mass like that.” A woman’s mother wakes up dramatically transformed, leading to a reappraisal of their relationships.
When you were / in the Everglades we canoed from Flamingo and through the canals.
My feet moved down another street / and I saw the shape they would draw / on the map in my mind.
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 a hundred years on.
But I do miss the hymns, / the small, hard apples with their dimpled skin. I do miss / things.
As a student, I stitched / a cadaver together / while my professor / said you must / be a predator . . .
“She stuffed spinach in her mouth until her teeth were a hayish green.” A woman’s extreme diet earns praise from church friends but concern from her family.
László Krasznahorkai’s latest novel reflects on the power of the surveillance state through the perspective of a librarian who wishes to lock up all books.
Congratulations to Parashar Kulkarni!
Congratulations to Njoku Nonso!
“When I flick the light on, my ceiling hangs open, a wide mouth.” After her bedroom springs a leak, an English professor tries to help a struggling student.
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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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