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
Elegy for Threatened Words
It wasn’t that the cake was vulnerable
to teeth so much as meant for eating—a mouth’s entitlement,
or, in indulgence’s own belly, a Lego project of cells, a fetus.
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.
Erosion Infrastructure
I took in a tired traveler.
What holding my bedframe.
Up off of the tired floor.
What set of cinder blocks grating.
Our Top 25 Poems of 2017
The poets on this list offer not answers or remedies but instants, instantiations of the power of the lived word as it unfolds for readers in real time.
Concord Grapes
What would it be like to belong
entirely in your own body, or in your own country, or at
your own address?
Inauguration Poem
Do you know what it’s like when a body twice yours
holds you down in the room where you make your life
until you wouldn’t know how to move even if he wasn’t
holding you down and then he splits you further open
The Ingenuity of Animal Survival
Deep in the enzyme is the shape of home.
Deep in the code is the architecture to nest.
In the Event of an Apocalypse, Be Ready to Die
But do also remember galleries, gardens, herbariums. Repositories of
beauty now ruin to find exquisite—
Two Poems
But the barefoot kids of the Wagenburg know
the trees must all stand to make the light and shade
work the way it does, their palisades against regulation.
A Body of Shifting Resilience
In Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Telepathologies, witnessing black death becomes an everyday thing.
Two Poems
Demise might not happen today what do I see
a large woman walking with two canes a striation
of exhaust fluid pooling in a left-over rain puddle
from a downpour this morning that I watched
Song of the Andoumboulou: 206½
She wanted to tell a story shrouded in
mist at the beginning, to give and to
withhold in giving it, the telling not the
tale
What Would Doctorow Do?
His novels might be read as a fictive analogue to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States: a polyphonic chronicle of the betrayal of his country’s original promise.
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