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
Our Most-Loved Culture Stories of 2017
Ten critical stories from 2017 that explore our present aesthetic moment: from the rise and fall of Milo Yiannopoulos to Instagram and the personal essay to The Handmaid's Tale and Drake.
Good Reader, Bad Reader
Bad readers were not born; they were created. To know them is to understand literature and politics in postwar America.
The Instagrammable Charm of the Bourgeoisie
The modes of perception and living that we attribute to Instagram are rooted in a much older aesthetic of the picturesque.
History Is a Dystopia
A conversation with novelist Tananarive Due on writing the past—and a way out of it.
An Autobiography of Captivity
Shane McCrae's new book, a finalist for the National Book Award, is an astonishingly precise account of a complex emotional past.
Sunflowers
Eventually, it became obvious that we didn’t have a mission. Or our mission, for what it’s worth, was the lack thereof.
Savage Vistas
Lynn Melnick's jagged poems interrogate rape culture to reveal the absurdity of misogyny.
Insignia Sonnets
Most of the town pronounces it “eye-rack”
like a gimmick display in the optometrist’s office.
Good Soldier’s Family, we learn to say it properly, roll back
the “r,” display that we’re no novices
with regards to current geopolitical affairs.
Imagine Every Light Is a Woman Who Came to the City Alone
A mother is a mother, regardless of the latest information regarding her children.
Delightful Homelands
In Kaveh Akbar’s debut collection, language is not only a homeland; it is also displacement.
Three Poems
Words a rotted barn, full of must
and straw and animals sleeping.
I want to dream with you the mountainsides,
the beaches, the necking in guestbeds,
the words the wiring of our cry.
Maria
The erudition of a monster is a hard, cruel thing,
the way it makes a body ache, stitch to stitch,
with all it will not, cannot, know. But crueler still
is how the erudition fades, how Frankenstein rose
Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue
“The intake process begins with dismantling her personal space, one mantle at a time.”
Broken Fairytales
Two recent books, works of collage and fragmented biography, bring Czech masterworks to new readers.
Lies
The seals are synchronized swimming again, like sad old ladies
in frilly bathing caps
My grandma nicknamed me Lemonade because I was yellow and ridged and buttery as
popcorn in that yellow sweater
The Sound Tomorrow Cannot Make
Alan Felsenhal’s striking debut collection, Lowly, achieves something like early modern surrealism.
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