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

Let my mother conquer me, let her

  • Jeremy Valentine Freeman

Poet’s Sampler

Introduced by Matthew Zapruder

  • Kate Hall

A Forbidden Hope

Reviewing Deepa Mehta’s Water.

  • Alan A. Stone

Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?

For many critics, photography has become a duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.

  • Susie Linfield

Microreview: Arthur Sze, Quipu

Poems that capture the world’s manifold facts one by one.

  • Brian Teare

Seduced

American Poets of the New Century.

  • Katie Peterson

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You and Me

  • Tom Thompson

New England Stories

 What sort of stories do New Englanders tell?

  • G.C. Waldrep

Microreview: Aaron Kunin, Folding Ruler Star

Poems that investigate shame.

  • Nicholas Bredie

Microreview: Arielle Greenberg, My Kafka Century

Poems that bristle with matter-of-fact strangeness.

  • Raymond McDaniel

An Underworldliness

for Aileen Winter Mostel

  • Heather McHugh

Theatre

  • Mei Underhill

Microreview: Linda Gregg, In the Middle Distance

Poems that deal with the memory-occupied ground somewhere between the past and the present. 

  • Dargie Anderson

Peyote

  • Liam Rector

The Dance

A short story. 

  • Jennie Berner

Unknowable

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's L'Enfant.

  • Alan A. Stone

Poet’s Sampler

Introduced by Stephen Dunn

  • Nicholas Harp

Science into Poetry

On Raymond Queneau.

  • Marjorie Welish

Wild By Nature

Meteroic Flowers by Elizabeth Willis.

  • Stefania Heim

Microreview: Craig Dworkin, Strand

Poems that ask the reader to reconsider if not abandon the notion of authorship.

  • James Wagner

Bad News

A short story. 

  • T.E. Holt

The Ark Of

  • Seth Abramson

from “Angle of Yaw”

  • Ben Lerner

Narayan Days

Rereading the master.

  • Jhumpa Lahiri
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