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

Believing in America

An intellectual project and a national ideal.

  • Leo Marx

Accra

A short story. 

  • Arthur Musah

Mirage or No Mirage

Reading Los Angeles.

  • Scott Saul

Conrad’s List

Working at the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village.

  • M.G. Stephens

Marketplace Multiculturalism

Monica Ali's Brick Lane.

  • M.K. Chakrabarti

All About Her Mother

The Midnight by Susan Howe. 

  • John Palattella

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Simic’s Peregrinations

Reading The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems.

  • Benjamin Paloff

Like Theseus through the Maze

The Soldiers of Year II by Medbh McGuckian. 

  • Jenny Ludwig

Microreviews: December 2003/January 2004

Six new collections of poetry.

Cougar

  • Sophie Cabot Black

The Art of Autobiography

  • Devin Johnston

Poet’s Sampler: Brett Fletcher Lauer

Introduced by Matthew Rohrer

  • Brett Fletcher Lauer

Arrange Me, Mysterious Men

  • Ida McCall

Seventeenth Series of the Static Logical Genesis

  • Paul Naylor

Eighteenth Series of the Three Images of Philosophers

  • Paul Naylor

Thou Hast Blessed the Work of His Hands

  • Bin Ramke

Les Corbeaux

  • Arthur Rimbaud

Tuesday Night

  • Sam White

An Audit by the Patio

  • Michelle J. Boese

Requiem

  • Angie Estes

Poet’s Sampler: Josey Foo

Introduced by Arthur Sze

  • Josey Foo

Like Cuttings for a Wreath of Praise and Ransom

  • Carl Phillips

Mastery

  • Carl Phillips

from REAL

  • Stephen Ratcliffe
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