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

from “Letters to Michael”

  • Mark McMorris

Things That Went Wrong Thus Far

A short story.

  • Deb Olin Unferth

The Dreamlife of Rupert Thomson

"Whenever I start a new book I have nightmares. Night after night."

  • James Hynes

Happy Endings

Pride and Prejudice directed by Joe Wright.

  • Alan A. Stone

Neglected

Samuel Menashe rediscovered.

  • Kurt Brown

A Broken Place

Pieces of Air in the Epic by Brenda Hillman.

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

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The Light in the Heart

Decreation by Anne Carson.

  • Joyelle McSweeney

The Speaking Ear

Radi Os by Ronald Johnson.

  • Dan Beachy-Quick

Lost

  • Michelle Noteboom

Sonnet

  • Sarah Rosenthal

A Small Anatomy of Feeling

  • Anna Rabinowitz

On the Phantom Estate

  • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Dream Job

  • Matthew Zapruder

Early

  • Mark Levine

Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake

  • Frank Bidart

A laborious wakefulness or was it a most unapologetic whistling in the ear

  • Shane Book

Fifteen Minutes

  • Ben Doyle

Poet’s Sampler: F. Daniel Rzicznek

Introduced by Larissa Szporluk

To Classes

  • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Review: Like Wind Loves a Window

By Andrea Baker.

  • Stefania Heim

Review: The Descent

By Sophie Cabot Black.

  • Robert Schnall

Review: Donald Revell, Pennyweight Windows.

Poems that mine solitary landscapes and mindscapes.

  • Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

Review: Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard

The first translation of poems by a female Iraqi poet to be published in the United States.

  • Susan Barba

Review: And Then Something Happened

Poems that point outwards toward realities beyond the poem.

  • Heidi Lynn Staples
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