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
Saint Lillie
My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.
Two Poems
The stones are endlessly weeping in the dark. Or is it
the bird-chatter of rain. O darling, are you writing
another poem about trees? No, not trees but ghosts
that live on trees and their legend of never-let-gos.
The Wind Has Swept Away What the Fire Has Spared
“I will be a tightrope walker,” she said, “and I will walk across the air to you.”
The Still, Small Voice That Thunders
“Most were drills. Pilots weren’t to know which were the real deal. They were not to think of the lethal effects of their duty.” A pilot is pulled aside by a desperate woman seeking help.
Post-Literature
This is my version of the story, but I will illuminate only a corner of it, one that ran parallel to and underneath it, revealing what was left in its wake.
Upper Avenue
“Abroadness became my obsession.” When a young Nigerian girl is invited to go live with her uncle in Canada, it sets in motion a peculiar friendship with someone she has long envied.
Undo
“You can’t go to Mass like that.” A woman’s mother wakes up dramatically transformed, leading to a reappraisal of their relationships.
It’s Time
My feet moved down another street / and I saw the shape they would draw / on the map in my mind.
Flowers for Farah
In her scholarship, mentoring, and activism, Farah Jasmine Griffin brings a praxis of radical love to an unequal academy.
A Century of Serious Difficulty
Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism a hundred years on.
Two poems by Hannah Craig
But I do miss the hymns, / the small, hard apples with their dimpled skin. I do miss / things.
Wounded Surgeon
As a student, I stitched / a cadaver together / while my professor / said you must / be a predator . . .
Six Months of Salad
“She stuffed spinach in her mouth until her teeth were a hayish green.” A woman’s extreme diet earns praise from church friends but concern from her family.
Archive Fever
László Krasznahorkai’s Spadework for a Palace reflects on the power of the surveillance state through the perspective of a librarian who wishes to lock up all books.
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