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

Treadmill

  • Chuck Tripi

“The Pants of Time”

Reading the poems of Duncan McNaughton.

  • Benjamin Hollander

Microreview: Alice Fulton, Barely Composed

  • Magdalena Edwards

Poet’s Sampler: Melcion Mateu

  • Melcion Mateu
  • Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Announcing the 2015 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest Winner

Selected by judge Ruth Ozeki.

  • Boston Review

The World

  • Eileen G’Sell

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Say Goodbye to the Shores (Catullus 101)

  • Mike Lala

Hashpipe of the Vanities

Overestimating the counterculture of the 1960s.

  • Hal Stucker

A Good, Bad, Hard, Easy Life

A new collection of Lead Belly’s recordings.

  • Dave Byrne

To the Celto-Ligurians

  • Don Bogen

Left Out

The instability of the white working class.

  • Claude S. Fischer

Microreview: Tarfia Faizullah, Seam

Giving rape survivors a voice.

  • Carina del Valle Schorske

An Extra Life

Jorie Graham's From the New World

  • Katie Peterson

I’m a Young Cowboy and Know I’ve Done Wrong

  • Catherine Pond

American Cynicism

And its cure.

  • Jess Row

Extremely Expensive Mystical Experiences for Astronauts

  • Dara Wier

Evangelizing Boston

"Church planting" uses public schools to reduce rent and retake secular Boston.

  • Katherine Stewart

Spring

  • Sumita Chakraborty

The Seduction of Normalcy

On Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.

  • Diana Arterian

Dedicated to the Kings of Rhythm and Blues

After years of obscurity, the “5” Royales are finally getting their due.

  • Colin Fleming

Microreview: Aaron Kunin, Cold Genius

  • Daniel Tiffany

Three Poems

  • Susan Lewis

Bookcase

  • Trent Busch

Decide for Yourself

Truth in the films of Errol Morris.

  • Randolph Lewis
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