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

The Beauty in Anyone

  • Michael W. Clune

Signaling at Any Cost

  • Danielle Pafunda

Response to “Cheap Signaling”

  • Ammiel Alcalay

Are Words Formed Out of a Hades Sort of Delight?

  • Aaron Kunin

Some Thoughts on Class-ology

  • Chris Nealon

Olfactory Cues

  • Martha Zweig

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Zero at the Boner

An interview with Nola Gignere.

  • Carol Muske-Dukes

Poet’s Sampler: Ocean Vuong

  • Ocean Vuong
  • Amy King

Microreview: Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess, X Marks the Dress: A Registry

  • Clare Emily Clifford

Overtaking

  • Sean Zhuraw

Some Other Being

An Interview with Brett Fletcher Lauer

  • William Brewer

Microreview: Roger Reeves, King Me

Mouths, metaphor, and metonymy.

  • Virginia Konchan

Let’s Be Real

Two books by Roxane Gay reflect on the state of feminism.

  • Lucy McKeon

sweeping psalm

  • Christopher Janke

Radical Feeling in the Poetry of World War I

Selections from war poets.

  • Len Gutkin

Nameless Lake: Occupation and the Ear

The violence of the struggle over this place raises many questions that center around the power to speak.

  • Nick Admussen

Riverboat

  • Adam Fitzgerald

Microreview: Kevin Young, Book of Hours

Tim Wood reviews Book of Hours, by Kevin Young.

  • Tim Wood

Farm Hubbub

  • John Ashbery

La Tlemcénienne

  • John Ashbery

Submitting to Truth

Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida

  • Alan A. Stone

Muted Protest

  • Tobi Haslett

African Poets’ Sampler

  • Jennifer Franklin

Agnus Dei: Mars

  • Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
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