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

What You Put In Your Mouth

A new anthology creates a new canon of innovative Latin@ writing

  • Rachel Galvin

Watch Us Elocute

  • Marcus Wicker

Two Poems

  • Rebecca Zweig

A Modern Marriage

A debut short story by an emerging Nigerian writer. Winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

  • Grace Oluseyi

Driving in the Downpour

Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi

  • Kim Hyesoon

Experience in Groups

  • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

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Vagenesis

  • Natalie Eilbert

Three poems from ‘Make Yourself Happy’

  • Eleni Sikelianos

I, Your Perfect Muse

Karen Lepri interviews Dawn Lundy Martin

  • Karen Lepri

They Want that New New World

M. NourbeSe Philip combs history for the black American experience.

  • Carina del Valle Schorske

Natural History

  • Camille T. Dungy

Predicament

  • Armando Jaramillo Garcia

A Vision in Concrete

Boston’s concrete modernist architecture is unsurpassed and widely despised.

  • Anthony Paletta

“We Called That Touch”

Race and the Intimate Tangle of American Experience

  • Ed Pavlić

Lillian Ross: Witness

The pathbreaking work of a not-quite-New Journalist.

  • Jacqui Shine

Von Freeman

  • John Koethe

Cluster at Jawlight

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

Poet’s Sampler: Lynne Procope

  • Lynne Procope
  • Ross Gay

Writing Under Surveillance

On the subversive fiction of East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig.

  • Tyler Curtis

Identity and the Avant-Garde

In art, formal innovation versus identity politics.

  • David Micah Greenberg

A Better Self

In Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, the crossroads of despair and integrity.

  • Alan A. Stone

The Spectacle of Transformation

The literal and metaphorical shapeshifting of the female body.

  • Marcela Sulak

“Elegy for Prison” and “Ode to Long Johns”

  • Joshua Bennett

Ferguson

Once there was a boy who thought it a noble idea to lie down in the middle of the street and sleep. . . .

  • Major Jackson
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