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

Nativity

  • L.S. Klatt

The God that Took the Place of Pleasure

  • Judith Hall

Pilgrim Sonnet

 
beginning with a line after Hopkins

  • Andrew Grace

Pilgrim Sonnet Redux

  • Andrew Grace

Union Square

  • Lori Shine

Poet’s Sampler: Jibade Khalil-Huffman

Selected with an introduction by Caroline Knox

  • Jibade Khalil-Huffman
  • Caroline Knox

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Review: Not Even Then

By Brian Blanchfield

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

Review: As in Every Deafness

By Graham Foust.

  • Jeffrey Jullich

Review: Eyeshot

By Heather McHugh.

  • Spencer Short

Review: Goldbeater’s Skin

By G.C. Waldrep.

  • Debora Kuan

Port Sunlight

  • Allen Grossman

Review: Of Thee I Sing

By Timothy Liu.

  • Garth Greenwell

High Art in Low Times

Two new books on the cultural Cold War.

  • Catherine Gunther Kodat

Not Your Father’s Formalism

Three new collections of poetry. 

  • Rafael Campo

The Devil and Henry Dumas

A lost voice of the Black Arts Movement.

  • Scott Saul

The Red Clock

A short story. 

  • Maile Chapman

Streaming Poetry

Tan Lin's BlipSoak01.

  • Brian Kim Stefans

Review: Fleet River

By James Longenbach.

  • Robert Schnall

The Happy Place

On Walt Kelly’s Pogo.

  • John Crowley

American Legacy

On writing The Vagabonds.

  • Nicholas Delbanco

Lawless

Bad Education, directed by Pedro Almodóvar.

  • Alan A. Stone

Harder to See

Reading the Illegible by Craig Dworkin.

  • Jacques Khalip

Review: Little Savage

By Emily Fragos.

  • Kathleen Rooney

Review: Columbarium

By Susan Stewart.

  • Nadia Herman Colburn
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