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

Never So Free

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation portrays an Iranian divorce under sharia law with sensitivity and pathos.

Alan A. Stone

Golden Buddha

Sandra Simonds

Poet’s Sampler: Sarah Blake

Sarah Blake
Catie Rosemurgy

The New Cinema

Joseph Chapman

Drinking with Mephistopheles

T. J. Jarrett

Sola Fide

Joseph Chapman

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Experience is a Thief’s Best Friend

Stephanie Ford

From That Were Once Beautiful Children

Claudia Rankine

At the Edge of the Bed

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Certain Allied Experiments

Lily Brown

Recommendation: Monica A. Hand’s me and Nina

Thomas Sayers Ellis

Pretty Little Failboat

Anthony Madrid

Milk the Dog and Walk the Cow

Anthony Madrid

The Precision Chromatic Ray Race of People

Anthony Madrid

The Precision Chromatic Ray Race of People

Anthony Madrid

Milk the Dog and Walk the Cow

Anthony Madrid

Pretty Little Failboat

Anthony Madrid

Order and Kinetics

Claire Donato

When All the Leaves

Oni Buchanan

For My Son

Stephen Dunn

Recommendation: Elizabeth Willis’s Address

Richard Deming

My Friends Were Having Sex and I Wanted to Fit In

Katie Degentesh

Wilds

Michele Glazer

“Transliterate mistranslations” of Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison En Enfer

Sean Kilpatrick

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