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
Deathly Love and Lovely Death
Not many periods in history are as at odds with themselves as England’s Victorian era.
The Allen Files
Midnight in Paris earned Woody Allen his fourth Oscar and was the biggest box office success in his long and productive filmmaking career.
Thomas Goes Riding the Silver Sunset
Your seatmate from Heathrow to Copenhagen is a beautiful young Estonian woman who, thankfully, is talkative.
Poet’s Sampler: Stefanie Wortman
Outside of reading (or rereading) Oliver Twist, we don’t typically receive or intend the word “artful” positively.
Microreviews: Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness
Dean Young’s first book of criticism is a frenetic and subversive meditation on poetry and poetics seemingly inspired by Whitman’s exhortation to “unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"