Arts in Society

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.

Browse by Genre

Criticism, Poem, Memoir, Short Story

Browse Criticism by Topic

Fiction, Film and TV, Literature, Music, Poetry, Visual Art

Acts of Mind

The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer.

  • Katie Peterson

Microreview: Cole Swensen, The Book of a Hundred Hands

100 poems on the human hand, from its prehistory to its depiction in contemporary painting.

  • Rob Schlegel

Microreview: Tom Thompson, The Pitch

Selling is the mode in which this collection operates.

  • Samuel Amadon

Microreview: Jane Yeh, Marabou

An impressive first collection.

  • Jennifer Chang

Microreview: Dean Young, Embryoyo

Poems that ricochet like pinballs with their own eclectic brand of kinesis.

  • Tess Taylor

Microreview: Nathaniel Bellows, Why Speak?

Poems full of wide-eyed candor of both the marvelous and the grotesque.

  • Kathryn Crim

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from Liner Notes

  • Andrew Mister

The Attorney Updates His Architect Spouse After Finding Premises for a Transcending Facility

  • Andrew Seguin

Boom Kiss Booom Boom Kiss

  • David Lau

A Name for this Bird

  • Nicholas Laughlin

Dreams Like a Bird

  • Nicholas Laughlin

Lookouts and Spies

  • Deborah Anne Roth

Sorry, T.

  • Brenda Shaughnessy

The Terrier

  • Jean Esteve

Of Progress and Implied Mission

  • Karla Kelsey

Poet’s Sampler: Kevin Davies

  • Kevin Davies
  • Joshua Clover

Babarian’s Fantasies

A short story. 

  • Peter Mountford

Homeland

The new generation of Nigerian writers.

  • Andrée Greene

Paradise Lost

The novels of Sarah Waters.

  • Jan Clausen

Any Human Heart

A review of Alejandro Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel.

  • Alan A. Stone

Into the Language Lab

Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr's Poetry and Pedagogy.

  • BK Fischer

Grand Failure

Hart Crane's Poems and Letters.

  • Calvin Bedient

A Measure of Splendor

The poetry of Taha Muhammad Ali. 

  • Victoria Chang

Microreview: Anna Moschovakis, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone

A remarkable first collection.

  • Nicholas Bredie
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