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

Review: The Everlasting Story of Nory

By Nicholson Baker.

  • Ed Park

Review: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Invitations to danger and salvation that makes the blues the blues.

  • Jonathan Gill

Microreviews

Summer 1998

Review: Szymborska

Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997.

  • Frances Padorr Brent

Review: Selected Letters of Marianne Moore

Edited by Bonnie Costello.

  • Kay Ryan

Review: Smokes

By Susan Wheeler.

  • Stephanie Burt

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Microreviews: Summer 1998

Seven new poetry collections. 

Poet’s Sampler: Benjamin Friedlander

Introduced by Robert Creeley

  • Benjamin Friedlander

A Photograph of a Crowd

  • Wisława Szymborska

“The Report of My Death Is an Exaggeration”

  • Alfred Corn

Helen

  • Anne Carson

Victory Must Be a Supremely Glorious Experience Said a Woman to the Duke of Wellington

  • Anne Carson

Homage to My Waitress

  • Matthew Rohrer

Paper Sacrifice

  • Karen Drayne

by bicycle

  • Matthea Harvey

Isla Mujeres

  • Mark Bibbins

The Toad and the Butterfly

Character, directed by Mike van Diem.

  • Alan A. Stone

They Have the Numbers; We, The Heights

On The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997.

  • Harold Bloom
with responses from
  • Mark Doty
  • Thylias Moss
  • Marjorie Perloff
  • David Mura
  • J. D. McClatchy
  • Kevin Young
  • Donald Revell
  • Reginald Shepherd
  • Suzanne Gardiner
  • Rita Dove
  • Ann Lauterbach
  • Carol Muske-Dukes
  • Sven Birkerts

The Price of Selfhood

Vivian Gornick’s The End of the Novel of Love.

  • George Scialabba

Visions of the American Beserk

Two master novelists tackle baseball, urban blight, and the counterculture in postwar America.

  • Paul Gediman

Marjorie Perloff Replies

  • Marjorie Perloff

Dear Editor

  • Arthur Vogelsang

Displacements

  • Juliana Chang
  • Walter K. Lew
  • Tan Lin
  • Eileen Tabios
  • John Yau

Bring Back Excellence

  • Greg Glazner
  • Jon Davis
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