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

Legitimate and Illegitimate Poems

There are really just two kinds of poetry these days.

  • Katie Degentesh

Pages and Soundscapes

All too often we treat poems as either written or spoken.

  • Lytton Smith

An Introduction to Alterity

The artist in me courts difficulty and complexity.

  • Noah Eli Gordon

Loaded Terms

We must not reduce the complex field of poetics to a simple dichotomy.

  • Evie Shockley

Heads Will Roll [or: I Did It My Way]

We must synthesize and expel binarial compounds.

  • Rebecca Wolff

The Freedom of Meter

Do real poets write in free verse?

  • Annie Finch

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Scientist or Mystic

Being a scientist in poetry has a clear trajectory and a long history.

  • Dorothea Lasky

Irony and Sophistication

Irony is not on one end of a spectrum, with feelings at the other.

  • Anthony Madrid

The Purposeful Lyric Life

I never got over the lyric charisma of poems in the first place.

  • Sandra Lim

Hybrid Poets Exist

Binary thinking is unproductive.

  • Samuel Amadon

The Difference Between Poetry and Song Lyrics

It is absurd to contend that lyrics inherently have less literary merit than poetry, or are easier to create

  • Matthew Zapruder

The Easy and the Hard

Tarring nouns such as “creativity” with scare quotes is easy.

  • DeSales Harrison

Ways to the New

So many binaries circulate in and around contemporary poems.

  • Stephanie Burt

Lying in a Hammock at Blue Mountain Center

“I have wasted my life.” A poetic response to Marjorie Perloff.

  • Maureen N. McLane

Who Are the Modernists’ Heirs?

Who are the modernists heirs? A poetic response to Marjorie Perloff.

  • Ange Mlinko

Echoes

  • Lindsay Turner

The Suffering of Others

Jorie Graham's PLACE.

  • David Micah Greenberg

Poem Beginning with a Line from Gammer Gurton’s Needle

  • John Ashbery

Recent History

  • John Ashbery

On Ninjas

  • Jane Yeh

Station

  • Andrew Zawacki

Là

  • Andrew Zawacki

Poet’s Sampler

Works by Grant Souders.

  • Grant Souders

A Parable

  • Anna Maria Hong
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