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

“You have been here some time”: Poetics of Failure and Song

Epanorthosis and song might finally be thought together.

  • Lindsay Turner

A Thousand Labyrinths

Peter Gizzi's In Defense of Nothing

  • Ange Mlinko

Microreview: Elizabeth Robinson, On Ghosts

Part poetry collection, part essay.

  • Christine Shan Shan Hou

Among the Elements in a Time of War

  • Eamon Grennan

Poet’s Sampler: Marni Ludwig

Introduced by Andrew Zawacki

  • Marni Ludwig
  • Andrew Zawacki

Measure Words

A cross-cultural reading group in Beijing

  • Drew Calvert

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Two Shorts

  • Edmundo Paz Soldán
  • Kirk Nesset

The Nation’s Mayor

Can Julián Castro Stop HUD's Wrecking Balls?

  • Edward G. Goetz

Oli Hazzard’s “Beyonsense”

One of the most exciting and original developments in UK poetry in years.

  • Stephen Ross

Night People

  • Lisa Olstein

from Odyssey

  • Lindsay Turner

Microreview: Harryette Mullen, Urban Tumbleweed

The poetry of a flâneuse.

  • Anna Moschovakis

Above the BQE

  • Roy Scranton

Nation and Body

Julie Carr's Rag

  • Karinne Keithley Syers

East Jerusalem

  • David Gorin

High Notes

  • Vona Groarke

Two Travelers

  • James Longenbach

Cheap Signaling

Class conflict and diction in avant-garde poetry

  • Daniel Tiffany

Runaway Tongue

  • Douglas Kearney

Microreview: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, TwERK

The tension between hype and substance. 

  • Mia You

Are You Jewish?

John Turturro's Fading Gigolo.

  • Alan A. Stone

Samuel Beckett, the Early Years

A lost story shows the young writer struggling in Joyce's shadow

  • Roger Boylan

Where My Body Has Been

  • Regina DiPerna

The Ethics of Being a Fan

Sports are an excellent tool for thinking through tricky ethical and political questions.

  • Andrew Mayersohn
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