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

A Bit of Proust

Anne Carson's The Albertine Workout.

  • Benjamin Landry

Microreview: Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, Chord Box

Poems to make music to.

  • Carina del Valle Schorske

Curio

  • Meghan Privitello

Chiasson’s Kindness

On Bicentennial.

  • Scott Bartley

Veer, Oscillate, Rest

  • Carrie Etter

Dear Friend,

The letters of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn, and Robert Creeley

  • Alan Gilbert

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The Last of the Great English Adventurers

Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road

  • Roger Boylan

Microreview: Rachel Zucker, the pedestrians

  • Chloe Garcia Roberts

The Doors of Perception

An interview with poet Daniel Nadler.

  • Timothy Donnelly

from The Lacunae

  • Daniel Nadler

Bird Spikes

You can evoke a bird with one, maybe two gestures. One is sufficient—beak or wing, and you’re done. Bird.

  • Amy Benson

One Size Fits All and Then Some

  • Jeff Alessandrelli

How to Give a Damn

Ann Lauterbach's Under the Sign

  • Jo Ann Clark

A Cold Hand Draws the Covers Over the Moon

  • Larry Sawyer

Jim Morrison, Where the Bombs Don’t Fly

American rock stars have the same black dots as French poets, Italian artists, Polish composers, and flamboyant British novelists.

  • Jackson Bliss

A Machine Ate My Language

  • Carmen Giménez Smith

Response to “Cheap Signaling”

  • Marjorie Welish

Other Remedies

  • Susan Briante
  • Farid Matuk

The Hoax of Translation

  • Johannes Göransson

Microreview: Gillian Conoley, Peace

  • Daniel Tiffany

God’s Country

The making of American exceptionalism.

  • Richard White

Of Fishiness, Flesh, and the Radical Undead

  • Jennifer Scappettone

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

  • Katy Lederer

Hart Crane in LA, 1927

  • Peter Balakian
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