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

End Credits (Friends)

  • D. A. Powell

Poet’s Sampler: Max Ritvo

  • Lucie Brock-Broido
  • Max Ritvo

Writing the Black Terrific

  • Carmen Giménez Smith

Linnaeus Town

  • Anne Carson

Ancient Combatant

  • Charles Simic

The Passion of Ellen Willis

On the feminist essayist, journalist, and music critic who championed women’s liberation.

  • Judith Levine

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Reading to My Father

“Listen I say to you, forgetting. Do you hear it Dad. Listen.”

  • Jorie Graham

Loops of the Perforce

  • Ryan Flaherty

Wharton, Colette, Lispector

Between 1885 and 1943, three brilliant female novelists married young, to men who would never understand their passions or come to terms with the scope of their gifts.

  • Max Nelson

The Ongoing Menace

Toby Martinez de las Rivas is the first poet to rise to Geoffrey Hill’s manifold challenges.

  • Dai George

How Should a Friendship Be?

On the reissue of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk.

  • Maggie Doherty

Transmission

  • Dore Kiesselbach

The Ironies of Embodiment

Frank Bidart in Poetry magazine.

  • Christopher J. Adamson

Park that Lark

Michael Almereyda's Cymbeline

  • Alan A. Stone

And Then and Then and Then

  • Catie Rosemurgy

Keepers of History

Mary Jo Bang's The Last Two Seconds.

  • Elizabeth Metzger

One Nigeria Under God

Nigeria's recent election encouraged alliances among Muslims and Christians.

  • Laura Premack

In a Peaceful Place

  • Andrew Allport

Shank of the Day: An Epithalamion

  • Rachel Galvin

Root Work

Nathaniel Mackey's Blue Fasa

  • Michael Leong

A Science of Literature

It has been said that computation will mark the end of humanistic inquiry. Actual literary research in this vein suggests otherwise.

  • Ben Merriman

Microreviews: July/August 2015

Dan Beachy-Quick, Tatsumi Hijikata, and more.

Arbiter

  • John Kinsella

Suspicious Duffel Bag, LSA Anaconda

  • Hugh Martin
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