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

Deer

I forgot for a while that happiness is fragile, that life is made of glass. Maybe I chose to forget those things or needed a rest from knowing them. Once I was reminded, I never forgot again.

  • James Pouilliard

Awakening

Muriel Rukeyser’s recently uncovered novel tells the story of a young woman coming of age—politically, sexually, intellectually—in a country at war.

  • Cecily Parks

The Discipline of Vicinity

Far from a paean to the far-off and the frontier, Walden testifies to what is most next and near.

  • Christina Davis

Censored by Google

Any literate person could recognize that the essay was a work of art. But Google’s family-friendly algorithm decided it was porn.

  • Joel Whitney

Poet’s Sampler: Julie Kantor

Inversive and torquing through pronoun and referent, Kantor’s poetry is faster in its lineation, more loyal and astringently ethical, more condensed and driving than any other you’re likely to find.

  • Julie Kantor
  • Josh Bell

Flo

  • Rae Armantrout

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Lost and (Almost) Found

Dara Wier's You Good Thing

  • Michael D. Snediker

Halfway/Stasis

  • Jane Lewty

Hardscrabble

The novel House of Earth shows Woody Guthrie in a different light, exiled from the Dust Bowl but dreaming of it still.

  • Megan Pugh

Subject of Study

If there is a moral limit to artistic license, director Alice Winocour has gone beyond it in Augustine.

  • Alan A. Stone

Microreview: Counting Sheep Until Doomsday, Carlo Matos

The prose poems in Carlo Matos’s second collection engage questions about the nature of free will: How does one discern fate from one’s choices?

  • Kristina Marie Darling

Bird, Singing

  • Lucie Brock-Broido

Why Sorrow Is Important

  • Jordan Windholz

Microreview: Anselm Berrigan, Notes from Irrelevance

Poems addressed to you as much as to anyone.

  • Roy Scranton

Here in the Birthplace of Cilantro

  • Jeff Encke

Aubade

  • Joanna Klink

Poet’s Sampler: Jessica Laser

Introduced by Mark Levine

  • Mark Levine
  • Jessica Laser

Debts

In Peter Stamm's World, We All Have Them

  • Roger Boylan

Round and Round

A wheeling book of aspirations and frustrations, London: A History in Verse offers us a literary treasury: a record of the city, a roll of its events.

  • Lytton Smith

Her Poets

A conversation with Maureen N. McLane

  • BK Fischer

Aubade

  • Joanna Klink

Can Science Deliver the Benefits of Religion?

New research shows that a scientific worldview helps people cope with feelings of powerlessness and the anxieties of mortality.

  • Tania Lombrozo

White Flights

On American fiction’s racial landscape.

  • Jess Row

KY

  • Jennifer Kronovet
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