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

To the Shopping Mall

No Sky

Glut Reactions

The Demographics of American Poetry

Waiting for Tear Gas

In our dreams the picket lines/ were picket fences. In our dreams…

Hosts

Playing football in the Soloman Islands. 

Dragon’s Blood

A food anthropologst’s early love affair with Chinese cuisine.

A March to the Grave

Joseph Roth and the End of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

2012 Poetry Contest Winner: Sarah Crossland

It’s a Small World

If it hadn’t been for Mickey Mouse, I wouldn’t be alive.

Gone

For Mark Strand, the End Is in Sight

Microreviews: September/October 2012

The Failure of Thought Leadership

Fareed Zakaria and the plagiarism scandal.

Deathly Love and Lovely Death

Not many periods in history are as at odds with themselves as England’s Victorian era.

Pirouette

Dispatch hates it when we go rogue.

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!"

Microreviews: Christopher DeWeese, The Black Forest

This debut collection is packed with personae the way a forest is packed with trees.

Microreviews: Amaranth Borsuk, Handiwork

Winner of the 2011 Slope Editions Book Prize.

Microreviews: Boni Joi, Before During or After Rainstorms

A vibrant and incisive first collection. 

House Search

Astronomers measure planetary eclipses…

Spool 25

my faith is/ stored in the/ wild domesticity of/ sunflowers aphids wives…

Slave (Jagger/Richards)

Darkness’s rivets weep white ink, hence the night…

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