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

Echo Near the End

  • Bill Knott

Poem That Wants to Be Ash

  • Bill Knott

(L)ID

  • Bill Knott

American Gestures

  • Paul Hoover

A short narrative in service of plot entitled Proximity of Exposed to Posed

  • Claudia Rankine

For Girls Only

  • Laura Sims

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Orpheus Under the Table

  • Liz Waldner

Split Personality

Girl, Interrupted, directed by James Mangold. 

  • Alan A. Stone

Salima on the Governor’s Bed

A short story. 

  • Jarda Cervenka

Trials of Conscience

Review: Peter Gadol and Robert C. S. Downs.

  • Randall Curb

Review: Blonde

By Joyce Carol Oates. 

  • Jill Eisenstadt

Review: Fay

By Larry Brown. 

  • Roger Boylan

Review: Blue Angel

By Francine Prose.

  • Lucinda Rosenfeld

Review: The Father of the Predicaments

By Heather McHugh. 

  • Richard Howard

Review: O Wheel

By Peter Sacks. 

  • Donald Revell

Review: Then, Suddenly—

By Lynn Emanuel. 

  • BK Fischer

Review: The Character and Polyverse

Two first "full length" volumes. 

  • Brian Lennon

Microreviews

April/May 2000

Poet’s Sampler: Joanna Klink

Introduced by Allen Grossman

  • Joanna Klink

Race

  • Elizabeth Alexander

Night Picnic

  • Charles Simic

Three Women Then a Still Life

  • Gillian Conoley

Not a Cloud in the Sky

  • Cort Day

Mouth

  • Cort Day
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