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

Fiction, Film and TV, Literature, Music, Poetry, Visual Art

Stranger Things: The Rise and Fall of UFOs and Life on the Moon

Let's all move to the moon.

  • John Crowley

“Lower the Pitch of Your Suffering”

. . . Free is not a negro doused
     in white, blanched,
bleached, and sent down
     the path. Free

almost never means alive, so
     please try—
I’m asking for help.

  • Charif Shanahan

A Backward Song

Stephen Burt talks with Monica Youn about her book Blackacre, longlisted for the National Book Award

  • Stephanie Burt
  • Monica Youn

Global Dystopias, Critical Dystopias: A Podcast with Junot Díaz

Our critique of the present is essential to producing a future. 

  • Junot Díaz

Berlin I

Translated from the German by Amanda DeMarco

  • Michael Braunschweig

From “Sagas of the Accidental Saint”

March 3, 2014, Iberia Parish, LA—

Police say that Victor White III, 22,

shot himself while handcuffed

in the back of a police cruiser.

  • Patricia Smith

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The Dragons Were Blue Too Soon

Max Ritvo and Elizabeth Metzger discuss music, meaning, and revision

  • Elizabeth Metzger
  • Max Ritvo

Between the Palm and the Ear, Is the Master’s Language

  • Natalie Diaz

Three Poems

As men
shuck oysters
in the open kitchen
I imagine your body
opening
to be eaten
alive. You will die . . .

  • Elizabeth Metzger

Think of Lampedusa

Translated from French by Todd Fredson

  • Josué Guébo
  • Todd Fredson

The Idea of Order

I stand to my chin in the
     cyan sea.
Salt burns my nose when I
     look down.
Nothing is near that belongs
     to me . . .

  • Michael Dumanis

Deconstruction: An American Tale

Lampooned as a dangerous import from Paris, deconstruction is in fact a distinctively American phenomenon.

  • Gregory Jones-Katz

Introduction to Reading Other Women

Literature can be a primary engine of dialogue and empathy, but it—or rather, the reading public—is often complicit in the silencing of global women of color.

  • Rafia Zakaria

Cher Baudelaire:

Today as I boarded my train of thought, I thought of you, your bristling ennui, and, in my mind, I opened my umbrella in the face of the porter carrying my cerebral baggage and in the face of that beauty with a nose ring from Phoenix.

  • Lynn Emanuel

Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code

I have learned to be still

I have learned that I don’t have
     to go anywhere

to find the center of the universe

Anything can be that center . . .

  • Thylias Moss

Transparents

When your father is trans, memoir is both personal and political.

  • Judith Levine

Broken Language

On you we barnacles
           cling and scratch,
                     your rising fog 
     burning through . . .
 

  • Catherine Wing

Accessible Difficulty

Hoa Nguyen's new poetry spans the cosmological and the political–and makes life seem profoundly necessary.

  • Ryo Yamaguchi

Underneath the Darkness

Yuri Herrera’s first two novels explore Mexican border identity. 

  • Aaron Bady

Trumpeteers

2016 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest Winner

  • Mikayla Ávila Vilá

Mourning 9/11

America continues to be haunted by our need to grieve.

  • Ingrid Norton

Back-to-School Poetry Reading

New poetry from Kristen Case, Tyehimba Jess, Khadijah Queen, and Timothy Yu.

  • Boston Review

Portrait of Hamlet in Repose

See how the firmament loosens
like a clod of earth                how the horizon

            crackles like two skulls wrapped in velvet

  • Rebecca Liu

2016 Poetry Contest Winner: Cori A. Winrock

Nothing fits properly in this 
     space, Little Sleeve.
Are you watching? The way I 
     am crawling across

the walls of every room of the 
     house like a wet
near-dead thing. Like the sad 
     sack that I am.

  • Cori A. Winrock
  • Shane McCrae
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