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

Hilton Als’s Lonely Black Man

What happens when identity returns to crumble our defenses.

  • Tobi Haslett

The dead inscribed, alphabetical, within

  • Susan Stewart

My Mother Reading in the Land of the Dead

  • Joe Weil

A World in Flames

Brenda Hillman's Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

  • Dana Levin

Microreview: Sarah Vap, End of the Sentimental Journey

A mystery poem.

  • Clare Emily Clifford

Dark, Understated Romantic Comedies

  • Chris Hosea

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Herta Müller’s Language of Resistance

Totalitarianism’s linguistic aggression.

  • Costica Bradatan

The Big Dig

Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History (1600-1800)

  • Roger Boylan

Satisfaction of the Instincts

  • Eric Linsker

By the Way

  • C. Dale Young

Microreview: Eleni Sikelianos, The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead

Collage poetics, scientific idiom, and exploration of the poem as essay.

  • Carol Moldaw

The Ache the Ache

  • Julia Cohen

A Note on Rae Armantrout

Who is this poet channeling?

  • Ilya Kaminsky

Microreview: Lyn Hejinian, My Life and My Life in the Nineties

Experiencing a classic anew.

  • Tim Wood

Poet’s Sampler: John Duvernoy

  • Timothy Liu
  • John Duvernoy

Ghost Poet

An interview with the Korean poet Kim Kyung Ju.

  • Jake Levine
  • Kim Kyung Ju

Poems on Surveillance

We invited poets to contribute new works, entering into a larger dialogue on what it means to have open eyes and ears in the twenty-first century. Poems by Armantrout, Ashbery, Bernstein, Pinsky, and others.

  • Andrew Ridker
with responses from
  • Cathy Park Hong
  • John Ashbery
  • Robert Pinsky
  • Charles Bernstein
  • Harmony Holiday
  • Rae Armantrout
  • Noelle Kocot
  • Richard Greenfield
  • Amy King
  • Jennifer Kronovet
  • Jessica Baran
  • Maureen N. McLane

Microreview: Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

  • Hilary Vaughn Dobel

Loser

Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis.

  • Alan A. Stone

Sonnet for My Son

  • Henk Rossouw

Microreview: Adam Fitzgerald, The Late Parade

A rowdy, erudite debut collection.

  • Julian B. Gewirtz

Does Reading Literature Make You More Moral?

Literature helps shape what we consider to be moral in the first place.

  • Paula M.L. Moya

Palisades Kepler

  • Mary Margaret Alvarado

Inclusivity Blueprint

  • Kit Schluter
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