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
On the Poetry of Institutional Violence
The anonymous collective BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP transmutes voices from the archive into lyric form.
Outcomes and Assessments
And above all else, you must remember
our raison d’etre, the mission of our
institution must suffuse your syllabi
from top to bottom.
Poems for Political Disaster
Marking a moment of rupture, summoning the collective strength found in the language of poetry.
Lost Child
It is possible I’ve written all I can
about her, my friend, who once saw
my coldness, young as we were, as
might.
Essay on Terry Pratchett (A Corollary)
If you die you are by definition not a reader.
This is the immortality afforded by literature.
The Lost Neruda Poems
As questions about Neruda’s death linger, a lost archive of unpublished poems, hidden amongst his notebooks, has surfaced.
On Surmising
Did you stagger back to her
or did you float
Did you wheel into that decade
once madly lost
You Appalachian, Reappropriating, Asshole Poets
my great uncle pitched
for the yankees. he also killed deer.
he never wrote a single poem
& i will always love him for it.
Two Poems
As if pleasure isn’t
historical. As if our bodies
are not
tightened, thinned,
or relaxed according to
dictators, bureaucrats, the inventors
of trans fats.
Urgent Missives
Since when has poetry been without politics? Benjamin Hollander reviews Out of Print by Julien Poirier.
Reading Yeats in the Age of Trump
No poet captures the feeling of political failure—of having lost an unfair fight—like W. B. Yeats.
Fall Poetry Reading
New poetry from Aracelis Girmay, Magdalena Zurawki, Liu Xia, John Wilkinson, and Ruth Madievsky.
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