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

Little Domesday Clock

Stroke the Eighth: Poet of Underwater Cities

  • Sam Witt

A Matter of the Skies

More birds appear. Bending against the cold, I watch, name, and name again.

  • Dave Byrne

Microreview: Dodie Bellamy, The TV Sutras

Television as aphorism.

  • Iris Cushing

Pastoral: I Live in the Country

  • Arielle Greenberg

After J. S. Bach / Cello Suite No. 6, BWV 1012

  • J. Mae Barizo

The Magician’s Volunteer

  • Christopher Roberts

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The Rhetoric of Cowardice

Recovering its usage.

  • Kyle Williams

Death Mask

On Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night.

  • Craig Morgan Teicher

Microreview: Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes

  • Andrew Ridker

Out of the Body

Mark Wunderlich’s The Earth Avails

  • Michael Klein

Fourth Theory: Pleasure, and We Stared Awed

  • Franke Varca

“The Tremendous Suffering of Ordinary People”

Barbara Rylko-Bauer’s A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps.

  • Paul Farmer

Of Popes and Dogs

The Church has always had a vexed, somewhat aggrieved relation to dogs and their status as things to be blessed or sanctified.

  • Colin Dayan

The Third Side of the Page

Mixed media from Anne Carson, Anne Michaels, and Matthea Harvey.

  • Joelle Biele

What Happened to the Bird People

  • Monique Wentzel

Microreview: Danniel Schoonebeek, American Barricade

  • John James

Letters

  • David Sanders

Integrity and Despair

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman.

  • Alan A. Stone

Microreview: Joan Naviyuk Kane, Hyperboreal

  • Suzanne Smith

Urban Fantasy

  • Denise Duhamel

The Flame in the Grate

Uche Nduka's Surrealism 

  • Joyelle McSweeney

Disassembling a Handgun

The technical challenge of translation.

  • Nick Admussen

The Russians Came!

Soviet émigré children spent their adolescence stretched on the rack of learning cool.

  • Val Vinokur

Microreview: Jane Miller, Thunderbird

  • Alexandria Peary
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