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

I Am Karl Marx

  • Jen Levitt

Everyone’s Problem

Imaginging, and depicting, sexual trauma in verse.

  • Jessica Bozek

Poetry in Ziploc Bags: How to Embrace the Academy

“I am less inclined to imagine a future for my students in which poetry has been restored to its rightful freedom as pure pleasure.”

  • DeSales Harrison

Bad Intelligence

  • Corey Van Landingham

Poet’s Sampler: Phillip B. Williams

Williams observes, with courage and fragility, his own mortality and promise.

  • Phillip B. Williams
  • Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In Memory of Sheldon Wolin (1922–2015)

The revolutionary theorist sought not liberal stability but democratic adventure.

  • Anne Norton

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Washington Square Park

  • Major Jackson

Agave

  • Primo Levi

An Honest Woman

Isabel Coixet's Learning to Drive

  • Alan A. Stone

Little Gods

Fanny Howe's Second Childhood

  • Heather Treseler

Those Absurd Notes

translated from the Spanish by Rosa Alcalá

  • Cecilia Vicuña

The Unseen World

Stacy Szymaszek’s hart island.

  • Dale Smith

Cheapest Solutions

Sure, we weren’t alone. We had neighbors a couple of miles down the road . . .

  • Dini Parayitam

Come On Up, Sweetheart

James Baldwin’s letters to his brother.

  • Ed Pavlić

What Kind

  • Maggie Nelson

The Gore Vidal Museum

The author's bid against being forgotten.

  • Daniel Luzer

Fall Poetry Reads

New books from Anne Boyer, Ross Gay, Corina Copp, Noah Eli Gordon, Sandra Simonds

Insofarian Regress

  • Nathaniel Mackey

John Clare’s Heirs

The Enduring Reach of a Rural Poet

  • Stephanie Burt

Memories of My Overdevelopment

  • Daniel Borzutzky

Barnum and Bosch (2)

  • John Yau

Smartphones Aren’t Anti-Social

Systematic, reliable evidence that Americans converse less in person than before is hard to find.

  • Claude S. Fischer

Poetic Geometries

Moby-Dick as Primer to Creative Crisis

  • Dan Beachy-Quick

Excerpt from “Stones Single, or in Handfuls”

  • Gozo Yoshimasu
  • Sayuri Okamoto
  • Derek Gromadzki
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