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

Commonplace

  • Rusty Morrison

Commonplace

  • Rusty Morrison

A Taxonomy of the Etiquette of Brandos

  • Eric Kocher

The Spot

  • Joseph P. Wood

Villanelle on a Line from Macbeth

  • Michael Davis

Thin Kimono

  • Megan Levad

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Where Love Grows

Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot is about becoming an adult, about moving, marrying, and making mistakes.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

The Escape Artist

Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations

  • Robert Huddleston

Imagining Faith

If Greenaway correctly diagnosed the aesthetic crisis of modern film, The Tree of Life is the remedy.

  • Alan A. Stone

Thirty Seconds From Now

The future is messy. He’s learned to wander only a few seconds ahead.

  • John Chu

Priest, Gangster, Drinker, Gent

Reading Flann in the birthplace of psychoanalysis. 

  • Roger Boylan

My Hungry Soul

Alfred Kazin’s raw materials.

  • Vivian Gornick

Gone Missing

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Metropole

  • David Gorin

In from the Cold

Miłosz and Brodsky’s productive exile.

  • Alissa Valles

Poet’s Sampler: Lauren Jensen

Lauren Jensen’s poems are girded with titanium exoskeletons and wear their underwear on the outside.

  • Lauren Jensen
  • Erika Meitner

After Battle

  • Karen Lepri

The Rock in Mid-Lake Disappears & I Who Might

  • Jeanne Larsen

Lottery

  • Anis Shivani

October

  • Joseph Fasano

Of Late Fashion

  • Scott Provence

Used-To Lives On

  • C. J. Sage

Soup Is One Form of Salt Water

  • Heather Christle

Yes

  • Anthony Opal

Microreview: Shane McCrae, Mule

Poems about being “half.”

  • Amelia Klein
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