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

Growing Up: Badger’s Daughter Speaks

  • Adam Day

Chokehold

Claudia Rankine's Embodied Rhythms

  • BK Fischer

Microreview: Aaron Belz, Glitter Bomb

  • Andrew Ridker

Goodbye to All That, the Birds Included

  • Adam Clay

Poems About Poems

  • Stephanie Burt

On Pablo Neruda and Autism

A conversation with Adam Feinstein.

  • Jessica Sequeira

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Two Poems

  • Monica Youn

I Am Nick Drake Now

Drake was an artist so out of step with his own time that he came to be in lockstep with things not bound by time.

  • Colin Fleming

Survival Italian

  • Chad Davidson

The Rise of the University Museum

Can campus galleries save the art museum?

  • Alana Shilling-Janoff

Strategic Interruptions

Notes on the work of Ammiel Alcalay.

  • Cole Heinowitz

Microreview: Jena Osman, Corporate Relations

  • Natalie Shapero

Archaeology: Toolbox with Level

  • Cara Chamberlain

2014 Poetry Contest Winner: francine j. harris

  • Major Jackson
  • francine j. harris

Light Fades in East Berlin

An Interview with Eugen Ruge.

  • John Shakespear
  • Eugen Ruge

spill

  • Beth Bachmann

Fearful Parenting Is Contagious

Anti-vaxxers need to relax.

  • Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Alive Knowing Death

Dorothea Lasky’s Rome.

  • Thomas Cook

Poet’s Sampler: Blair Johnson

  • Mónica de la Torre

Microreview: Frances Justine Post, Beast

  • Kay Cosgrove

Gedankenexperiment

  • Sean Bishop

Any Further West

  • Kali Fajardo-Anstine

My Body Is a Cage

Mixed Martial Arts as Greek Tragedy

  • Jenny Hendrix

Epic Hour

  • Sherod Santos
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