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

Microreviews: February/March 2003

Eight new poetry collections.

Reel Terrorism

Reconsidering Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.

  • Alan A. Stone

Noir Voyager

Alan Furst’s glamorous, doomed world.

  • Roger Boylan

Homecoming

When I decided to tell the story of the dead in Yugoslavia, I learned the power of fiction as a political tool.

  • Natasha Radojcic-Kane

Poet’s Sampler: Lawrence L. White

Introduced by Reginald Shepherd

  • Lawrence L. White

Attachments

  • Richard Howard

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Daunting

  • John Latta

Romp and Storm

  • John Latta

9 table settings

  • Dorothea Tanning

Flea Market (Rainy Day)

  • Dorothea Tanning

from “[ Adam ]in fragments/with a poem engraved/down the thighs”

  • Brian Teare

4:30 Lakeshore Limited Was in the Past

  • Rebecca Wolff

Men I Don’t Talk to Anymore

Winner of the Tenth Annual Boston Review Short Story Contest.

  • Gale Renee Walden

Green, Prickly Humanity

Rural Wisconsin’s exhilarating, lost poet

  • Karen Volkman

Notes from the Underground

Disobedience by Alice Notley.

  • Brian Kim Stefans

The Biases of Grief

Song and Dance by Alan Shapiro.

  • Brian Henry

Microreviews: December 2002/January 2003

Thirteen new poetry collections.

Dreams and Deceptions

Zhang Yimou loses his muse.

  • Alan A. Stone

Indians

A short story. 

  • Scott Blackwood

Making History

In the new historical novel, the past is part of the fiction.

  • Richard A. Kaye

Unnatural Sentences

Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science.

  • Brenda Wineapple

Stripped-Down Sappho

More of the Tenth Muse shows through the fragments in an astonishing new translation.

  • John D’Agata

Celebrating a World in Danger

Jorie Graham's Never: Poems.
 

  • Bin Ramke

Modernism, Again

Two new collections by Jennifer Moxley and Geoffrey G. O’Brien.

  • Cole Swenson
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