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

Microreview: Amy King, I Want to Make You Safe

Poems on personal and political insecurity.

  • Tim Wood

Political Hatred in Argentina

Guardian journalist Uki Goñi discusses his career reporting from Buenos Aires.

  • Jessica Sequeira

Microreview: Martha Ronk, Transfer of Qualities

Part museum study, part lyric essay.

  • Benjamin Landry

Seascape

My girlfriend has a third eye. It’s in the middle of her forehead. It was hidden underneath her bangs.

  • Holly Pekowsky

Wolf Cento

  • Simone Muench

Lyric Backlash

Thoughts on the Oulipo and César Vallejo in response to Calvin Bedient.

  • Rachel Galvin

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Flarf is Life: The Poetry of Affect

In response to Calvin Bedient.

  • Drew Gardner

Turbulence

Ed Skoog's Rough Day

  • Broc Rossell

Threat Level: Poetry

The monster gone rogue.

  • Amy King

Exploring the Hidden China

Yu Hua's Boy in the Twilight.

  • Drew Calvert

The Mother’s Song

  • Henry Israeli

Poet’s Sampler: Maud Poole

  • Cate Marvin
  • Maud Poole

The Larger Lesson of Huckabee’s Comments on Women

The larger Republican rhetorical strategy.

  • Elizabeth Bruenig

Microreview: Matthew Rohrer, Destroyer and Preserver

  • Joshua Wilson

Vaulted Forms

  • Adam Fagin

Under the Cross in China

Christian weddings are on the rise in China, even among non-believers.

  • Xiao-bo Yuan

Notes on Nursery Rhymes

The absence of children who have died mark mothers’ lives.

Explanation

  • Josh Kalscheur

Sieves of Consciousness

On Mary Ruefle's Trances of the Blast

  • BK Fischer

BBP13

Ahren Warner strikes a seductive compact between the older and younger camps of British poetry.

  • Dai George

Suffering and the Second Amendment Debate

Should gun deaths be spoken about in the debate about gun control?

  • Simon Waxman

Letter from the Ice Field, December

  • Sara Eliza Johnson

From the First Book of Far Away

  • Eileen G’Sell

Forgetting the Holocaust

The Book Thief is a Holocaust story far removed from the one told by survivors.

  • Alan A. Stone
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