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
Submit: The Aura Estrada Short Story Contest
Judged by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the contest is open until October 1. The winner receives publication and a $1,500 prize.
Three Poems
A long time ago
A group of old white men
Sat in a wopped circle just like this
In weird worship
Trying to determine
Who or what or when God is
The Obsessions of Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick
A new book takes on the titans of twentieth-century cinema, fetishes and all.
Dayshift as Conduit
My mother told me I live
like a beast and like a beast
I will die. So goes the omen:
my family tree rooted in animal
There Is No History Without Names
Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection confronts a history of physical, cultural, and linguistic violence.
Summer Poetry Reading
New poetry from Chen Chen, Jennifer Kronovet, Jennifer Scappettone, Alli Warren, and Andrew Wessels.
How the Cinder Bears the Seed
Susan Stewart's new poetry collection questions the power and potential of her own art.
In Memoriam: Neil Gordon
As a writer and literary editor, Neil Gordon was committed to the debate between purity of conviction and worldly engagement.
Astralize the Night
Anne Carson’s new work, Float, is a boxed set of twenty-two chapbooks in which the poet plays with different voices.
Two Poems
these men
are overused, old at thirty-five, ancient
at forty. Brawls and head-butts at half court,
enlarged hearts, divine idolatry.
Familiar Shapes Entering the Body Raw and Undigested
Adam Fitzgerald’s ‘George Washington’ memorializes the author’s childhood in a stripmall America that is at once instantly familiar and arrestingly strange.
Parallax of Diaphanous and Salt
. . . in Midwestern cul-de-sacs
I understood lingering, the right-hand self
devoted to architecture the left-hand self not
devoted to anything at all
Radicalism Begins in the Body
Junot Díaz interviews science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany about what it means to be an aging sex radical and why he wrote the essay “Ash Wednesday.”
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