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

Shipfitters

  • Allen Grossman

Flight

A short story. 

  • Ishle Yi Park

Photographing Cruelty

In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the weapon of choice was not the gun but the spectacle of public shaming.

  • Susie Linfield

Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn

Reading Harvey Swados.

  • Grace Paley

The Secret Lives of Men

Pat Barker's ambitious project.

  • James Hynes

Desire’s Nemesis

Seven new poetry collections. 

  • Calvin Bedient

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Poetry in Motion

Some Values of Landscape and Weather by Peter Gizzi.

  • Andrew Zawacki

The Little War Begins

Trouble in Mind by Lucie Brock-Broido.

  • Larissa Szporluk

Microreviews: Summer 2004

Five new collections.

The End of Remorse?

The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson. 

  • Alan A. Stone

Yellow Balloon Rising

  • Edward Bartók-Barata

an animal meant

  • Carol Ciavonne

Poem in the Manner of Friedrich Hölderlin

  • David Lehman

Poem in the Manner of Wallace Stevens as Rewritten by Gertrude Stein

  • David Lehman

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios

  • Adrienne Rich

how music is supposed to be

  • Carol Ciavonne

Immediately Thinking

  • Steve Willard

Poet’s Sampler: Gregg Biglieri

Introduced by Craig Dworkin

  • Gregg Biglieri

The Tanker Never Moves

  • Terese Svoboda

The People’s Poetry

National Poetry Month, without lament.

  • Hank Lazer

Pound Ascendant

New collections of Ezra Pound’s poetry. 

  • Marjorie Perloff

The Fugitive

The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics.

  • John Hulsey

Radical Pastoral

Review: Selected and New Poems from John Kinsella.

  • Emily Apter

Last Battle

Burn!, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.

  • Alan A. Stone
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