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

Fatal Affliction

  • Raymond McDaniel

Microreview: Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs

  • Chris Pusateri

Microreview: Thylias Moss, Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse

  • Brian Teare

Microreview: Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs

  • Heidi Lynn Staples

Microreview: In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

  • Jennifer Grotz

Microreview: Andrew Zawacki, Anabranch

  • DeSales Harrison

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The Circle of the Fifths

  • Catherine Meng

A Set Piece

  • Jesse Ball

Endless Topic

  • Richard Meier

Composite after Three Poems in the Same Anthology

  • Rafael Campo

Waste Capital

  • Giles Goodland

Double Sonnet

  • Dara Wier

Other People’s Grief

Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days.

  • Jan Clausen

Choosing Love

The Beat That My Heart Skipped, directed by Jacques Audiard.

  • Alan A. Stone

Chamber Heart

  • Anne Duden
  • Andrew Shields

Site

  • John Kinsella

Microreview: Sabrina Orah Mark, The Babies

  • Debora Kuan

Pliny I & II

  • Dan Chiasson

Microreview: Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures

  • Jesse Lichtenstein

Summer of Nene

A short story. 

  • Ivelisse Rodriguez

Microreview: Christian Hawkey, The Book of Funnels

  • Kathleen Rooney

I Know of No Better World

  • Ingeborg Bachmann
  • Peter Filkins

Microreview: Gilbert Sorrentino, New and Selected Poems: 1958-1998

  • Mary Maxwell

I Wanted the Screen Door of Summer

Opening sounds of blackbirds everywhere
everywhere in the day lost in sun

  • Peter Gizzi
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