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

“There Is a Star in the Sea”

  • Dan Chiasson

Poet’s Sampler: Charlotte Boulay

  • Charlotte Boulay
  • Thomas Lynch

Disappearing Acts

  • Jacob Edmond

Microreview: Catherine Barnett, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced

  • Penelope Cray

Two Sonnets

  • Karen Volkman

An American Prophet

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.

  • M.K. Chakrabarti

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Explaining Love Away

Kings and Queen, directed by Arnaud Desplechin.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Quest

  • Peter Gizzi

A Witness to Murder

Heinrich Jöst’s photographs of the Holocaust dwell in what Jean Améry called “the waiting room of death.”

  • Susie Linfield

Earthbound

  • John Koethe

Object Relations

  • BK Fischer

The Caedmon Room

  • Allen Grossman

Microreview: C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

  • Brian Teare

Microreview: James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry

  • Robert Schnall

Microreviews: Marjorie Perloff, Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

  • Joshua Corey

Microreview: Jordon Davis and Sarah Manguso, Free Radicals

  • Rusty Morrison

Poet’s Sampler: Melanie Cooley

  • Melanie Cooley

Kansas in Verse

  • Joanne Straley

Poetry Is Poetry

On John Ashbery.

  • James Longenbach

Little Criminals

Reading Richard Hughes.

  • John Crowley

Dreamoirs

A short story. 

  • Marian Marzynski

Microreview: Rebecca Wolff, Figment

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

Pride

  • Sally Dawidoff

The Ill–Tempered Clavier

  • Benjamin Paloff
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