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

If Hounds

  • Genevieve Burger-Weiser

Aviator on the Prowl

The winner of Boston Review’s annual Aura Estrada short-story contest.

  • Kalpana Narayanan

Bin Laden: The Movie

The director of The Hurt Locker takes on the 9/11 mastermind

  • Alan A. Stone

How to Write About Africa

At the offices of Kwani—a literary agitator without peer. 

  • Anna Clark

Like a Dog

Serge Avedikian’s Barking Island.

  • Colin Dayan

Europeans Against Multiculturalism

Political Attacks Misread History, Target Muslims, and May Win Votes

  • John R. Bowen

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Square Dance

Agnes de Mille’s Beloved Community

  • Megan Pugh

Out of Reach

Susan Howe’s, That This.

  • Richard Deming

(Most) Everyone’s Invited

Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, 

  • Dai George

Microreview: CAConrad, The Book of Frank

Birth, childhood, independence, sexual awaking, marriage, parenting, and death. 

  • Noah Eli Gordon

Microreview: Wisława Szymborska, Here

Poems that are haunted by visitations: the figure of memory, the personification of an idea, the poet as a teenager.

  • Elisabeth Divis

Microreview: Allison Titus, The Sum of Every Lost Ship

“Stationed fast to parentheses of sleep and winter,” Allison Titus’s debut collection, The Sum of Every Lost Ship, probes the emotion of the (nearly) motionless.

  • Amelia Klein

Microreview: L. S. Klatt, Cloud of Ink

 A bird or beast appears in almost every poem in this collection.

  • Raymond McDaniel

Microreview: Grace Zabriskie, Poems

An authentic and spirited book from a longtime character actor.

  • Lynn Melnick

Safe House

  • Solmaz Sharif

Reverse: A Lynching

Return the tree, the moon, the naked man / Hanging from the indifferent branch

  • Ansel Elkins

Point

  • Adam Roberts

Self Suck

  • Angelo Nikolopoulos

Poet’s Sampler: Ann Marie Thornburg

Owen Barfield wrote of the “felt change of consciousness” that occurs when a reader encounters a true poem. I read poems every day longing to experience that, and when I read Ann Marie Thornburg’s, I do.

  • Ann Marie Thornburg
  • Laura Kasischke

Lollipop

  • Daniel Coudriet

Breath

  • Daniel Coudriet

By Some Miracle a Year Lousy With Meteors

  • Cynthia Arrieu-King
  • Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Frog and Toe

  • Caitlin Dube

Hate Mail

  • Carol Muske-Dukes
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