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

Man Made Out of Words

Part One of Mark Strand's Last Interview

  • Adam Fitzgerald

Republic of Mine

  • John Fenlon Hogan

Microreview: Sandra Lim, The Wilderness

  • Krystal Languell

Microreview: Olena Kalytiak Davis, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems

  • Jeanine Deibel

Building a Joke

  • David Hernandez

The Sweet and Angry Music of Amiri Baraka

On SOS: Poems, 1961­–2013.

  • William J. Harris

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Cold Comfort

Three new books thread feminist impulses through narratives of precarity and desolation.

  • Natalie Shapero

How to Bring Your Children to America

  • Hafizah Geter

from The Enmeshments

  • Jorie Graham

The Server

  • Justin Phillip Reed

Microreview: TJ Jarrett, Zion

  • Heather Treseler

Poet’s Sampler: Damian Rogers

Introduced by Hoa Nguyen

  • Damian Rogers

Curves and Intimations of a Great Disease

  • David Kutz-Marks

Winter Troll

  • Ann Lauterbach

Microreview: CAConrad, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness

  • Charles Legere

Unruly Thoughts

Kimiko Hahn's Brain Fever

  • Benjamin Landry

Crisis of Man? Lighten Up

“What should be the starting point for twenty-first-century thought?”

  • Kevin Mattson

Against Type

Broad City is a platonic “romance between two friends” who happen to be women.

  • Lucy McKeon

From Jim-Crow to “Color-Blind” Poetics

Race and the So-Called Avant-Garde

  • Dorothy Wang

Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde

The aestheticization of the term avant-garde is a refusal to think what the alienation of human being in the modern era was made of.

  • David Marriott

En Face

  • Lyn Hejinian

Model Minority, Dreaming, and Cheap Signaling

Outrage and Outreach

  • Prageeta Sharma

A White Song

  • David Lloyd

Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde

  • Mónica de la Torre
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