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.
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Criticism, Poem, Memoir, Short Story
Browse Criticism by Topic
Elegy beginning in the shade of Aunt Mary’s mulberry tree
A week before the woman whose tree
that golden dog was tied to died, I watched
my daughter trust its limbs.
Aubade
Pardon my asking, but do you think I could drink
this and be okay? I am still learning the scents
of poisons, can’t yet smell them in the wild. Sip it
and tell me if you die.
Fresh Kills
Trash the animal out of place:
the body blown against the fence, the meat that spills over the border
Among Some Anapests at Civic Center
The fascists have entered the town
Sun like a late ripe peach
City says no
to masks
Where Islands End and Begin
Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [lukao] is a personal document of witness, shelter, history, and hope.
In Memoriam: Lucie Brock-Broido
Of the many words that might describe Lucie Brock-Broido, the most appropriate is extraordinary.
A Postcard from Ursula
A science fiction writer remembers his early correspondences with Ursula Le Guin.
Introducing “What Nature”
The poems collected in What Nature were written in the predawn of the Sixth Extinction Event.
Casserole Brigades and Corporate America
With Proprietary, Randall Mann comes into his own as a poet of wit and cynicism.
Glowing with Absence and Merchandise
Harmony Holiday's new book, Hollywood Forever, is a warehouse of quotidian pleasures and horrors.
Black Panther Is Not the Movie We Deserve
The movie, unique for its Black star power, depends on a shocking devaluation of Black American men.
Callimachus in Jelly Shoes
Burt’s latest collection reveals a poet looking back to formative moments in the 1980s when poetry first began to offer succor, and a playlist, for the fact of our weightful existence.
Three Poems
“To survive” means to be
alive despite what nearly
took you or did the dead.
My faceful of arrowheads
pointing at—
Undoing a Long Erasure
A new collected works of Marianne Moore restores many poems to better versions lost in subsequent editions.
Curiosity (X)
The first joke goes: suppose I told you how
often I draw bangs on women that I haven’t
met and who don’t wear bangs?
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