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

Brushfire

  • Quinn Latimer

Notes on Exoticism

  • Angie Yuan

from “Helsinki”

  • Peter Richards

Hands Off Clitoridectomy

Not since Masters and Johnson has the clitoris—or its absence—been a topic of such intense debate. 

  • Yael Tamir

A Waiting Heart

  • Robert Hahn

That Everything’s Inevitable

  • Katy Lederer

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Fate

  • Robert Desnos
  • William Kulik

from “Shy Green Fields”

  • Hugh Steinberg

Talk, Talk, Talk

David Antin's i never knew what time it was.

  • Ernest Larsen

Poet’s Sampler: Jenny Boully

Introduced by Mary Jo Bang

  • Jenny Boully

Extended Play

Elizabeth Bishop's Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box.

  • John Palattella

A Village Journal

  • Sandra Lim

Bridge Building

On writing Brookland.

  • Emily Barton

Microreview: Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage

Poems with a playful yet urgent sense of risk.

  • Kathleen Rooney

Microreview: Stephen Paul Miller, Skinny Eighth Avenue

Poems that address politics, current events, theoretical concerns, and personal experience.

  • Barbara K. Fischer

How to Escape from a Leper Colony

The winner of Boston Review's 13th Annual Short-Story Contest.

  • Tiphanie Yanique

Microreview: Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives

Poems chronicling the lives of everyone the poet had ever come into contact with.

  • Katie Peterson

Name Calling

Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt.

  • Andrée Greene

Microreview: Joe Wenderoth, The Holy Spirit of Life.

Essays for John Ashcroft’s Secret Self.

  • James Wagner

Furniture of the World

  • Kathy Nilsson

Judgment Day

The Academy’s voters rejected Brokeback Mountain, but the film marks an important moment in Hollywood history.

  • Alan A. Stone

Microreview: Hank Lazer, The New Spirit

A crisis in search of resolution through language.

  • Rusty Morrison

A Triumvirate

  • Katy Lederer

Job’s Hope

On not knowing God.

  • Ben-Zion Gold
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