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

Leopold Stokowski tells Marian Anderson, “My roof is too low for you.”

  • Elizabeth Robinson

American Psalm

  • Dean Rader

New Nature

Women Poets Escape Family—And Convention

  • Katie Peterson

Shifting the (Im)balance

On race and the poetry canon.

  • Evie Shockley

A Fly Inside a Fly a Thought Inside a Thought and Mario Santiago Inside Mario Santiago

Translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy

  • Roberto Bolaño

Bloody Abroad

Amanda Knox finds herself.

  • Merve Emre

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Hold the Finch

  • Jean Valentine

The After Party

An Interview with Chris Martin on Becoming Weather

  • Ted Mathys
  • Chris Martin

Identity We Are Willing to Have

A Vassar grad of peranakan descent finds herself in the Navajo Nation.

  • Josey Foo

Thrilled with the Gifts of Humans

A Conversation with Michael Zapruder

  • Dan Chelotti
  • Michael Zapruder

The World Is Really Falling Apart

A Conversation with Noelle Kocot

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder
  • Noelle Kocot

The Poetesses

An Interview with Lisa Russ Spaar, Aracelis Girmay, and Daisy Fried

  • BK Fischer

The Forgetting Shiraz

‘He wanted to forget the brutalities he’d seen, start a vineyard, a winery. The shiraz seemed an appropriate place to start.’

  • E. Lily Yu

Unacceptable

Paul Goodman was thinking globally and acting locally before it became a slogan.

  • Judith Levine

from The Uses of the Body

  • Deborah Landau

Eat What You Kill

  • Sophie Cabot Black

The Boy Under the Car

  • John Freeman

Ecstasy

  • Jane Miller

Declining Public Appetite for Large Wars of Occupation

  • Dara Wier

Exhuming Neruda

How did Chile’s great poet die?

  • Stephen Phelan

Praying to Allah on Bastille Day

Winner of the 2012–2013 Boston Review Essay Contest

  • Kate Korman

A More Ordinary Poet

With Emily Dickinson, the challenge is to understand a flesh-and-blood woman whose life took place on paper.

  • Gillian Osborne

The Progressive Puritan

Revisiting the Poems of Marianne Moore

  • Siobhan Phillips

Nocturne

  • Julia Guez
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