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

Microreview: Anja Utler, Engulf—Enkindle

An exciting young German-language poet of rare linguistic and imaginative inventiveness and power.

  • Paul Franz

Microreview: Ewa Chrusciel, Strata

Remarkable prose poems from Poland.

  • Tony Brinkley

Microreview: Heather Christle, The Difficult Farm

A powerful voice in younger American poetry has arrived.

  • Robert Schnall

Microreview: Joanna Klink, Raptus

Joanna Klink’s third collection, Raptus, masterfully navigates the treacherous zone between the lyric and the all-too poetical.

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

Seriously Funny

On Howard Jacobson, the Jewish Jane Austen.

  • Roger Boylan

Revaluing the Book

An interview with Richard Nash.

  • Richard Nash
  • Matt Runkle

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What’s in a Name?

A Case for Pseudonyms

  • Jillian C. York

Poet’s Sampler: Rodney Jack

Poems by Rodney Jack.

  • Cate Marvin
  • Wayne Johns
  • Rodney Jack

In the Details

Looking Closely with Allan Peterson

  • Stephanie Burt

When That Becomes This

Comparison in politics and poetry.

  • David Micah Greenberg

Microreview: Ian Pindar, Emporium

A darkly genial debut collection.

  • Paul Franz

Microreview: G. C. Waldrep and John Gallaher, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

Two poets collaborate on a shared present. 

  • Raymond McDaniel

Microreview: Rob Schlegel, The Lesser Fields

Transition and transience govern the obsessions in this first collection.

  • Jay Deshpande

Microreview: Christian Hawkey, Ventrakl

A ghost story—not in the flashlight-under-the-face, seated-around-the-campfire sense, but rather in the hauntological, Derridean one.

  • Kathleen Rooney

Microreview: Michele Glazer, On Tact, & the Made Up World

Poems that approach death with lyricism.

  • Sean Patrick Hill

Evening in the Company of Undecided Birds

  • Calvin Bedient

From Love, Imagination

  • Sarah Sarai

So Tender Beauty

  • Sarah Sarai

Passage

  • Alex Dimitrov

The Gift Shop

  • Cate Peebles

ROTC Kills

  • John Koethe

America! America!

  • Ricardo Maldonado

Song for Sonoma

  • Tess Taylor

From the Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Paradox

  • Brian Blanchfield
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