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

Recipes for Red (From Such Rich Hour)

  • Cole Swensen

Preface (from Such Rich Hour)

  • Cole Swensen

Monstrous

  • Lynn Melnick

Year Zero

  • Joshua Clover

Purgatorio‚ Canto XXIX

  • Dante Alighieri
  • W.S. Merwin

In Defense of Poetry

Put the literature back into literary studies.

  • Marjorie Perloff

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The Sublime Beethoven

What the composer and Kant had in common.

  • Dmitri Tymoczko

Regeneration

Winner of the Seventh Annual Short Story Contest

  • Pauls Toutonghi

American Faith, American Violence

Reading Robert Stone.

  • Michael Greenberg

Western Voices

Reading Kent Haruf.

  • Laura Hendrie

Voices from the Old Country

Review: Leslie Epstein and Judy Budnitz.

  • Paul Gediman

Review: How Aliens Think

By Judith Grossman.

  • Susan Daitch

Review: The Walking Tour

By Kathryn Davis.

  • Edwin Frank

Review: Walkin’ the Dog

By Walter Mosley.

  • Peter McCarthy

Review: Girls on the Run

By John Ashbery. 

  • John D’Agata

Review: Towards the Blanched Alphabets

By Gustaf Sobin.

  • Andrew Zawacki

Review: Trappings

By Richard Howard.

  • Benjamin Ivry

Review: The Last Avant-Garde

By David Lehman.

  • Michael Tyrell

Microreviews: December 1999/January 2000

Eight new poetry collections. 

Highway to English

  • Suzanne Wise

The Origin of Olive Oyl

  • Denise Duhamel
  • Maureen Seaton

The Kitchen of Francesca and Paolo

  • Joshua Corey

Rerum Novarum

  • Gerardo Deniz

Romulus Augustulus

  • Gerardo Deniz
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