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

In the Vestibule, in the Barn, in the Hayloft, in the Forest with the Planetesimals

  • Dara Wier

Playing Out the String

  • Alan Gilbert

Piano Music for a Silent Movie

  • Susan Stewart

What Paths He Took

for Jonathan Eugene Skanda Brilliant, 1984–2011

  • Laura Goode

New Translation

  • Dai George

The Nut

(1921, and 1920 in development)

  • Arthur Vogelsang

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Poetry Machines

  • Cate Marvin

from Notes from Irrelevance

  • Anselm Berrigan

We are birds in migration

Translated from the Russian by Stephanie Sandler

  • Elena Shvarts

Selections from The Other Poems

  • Paul Legault

(Afterward) One Corner More/ Notes on a Letter to the Singer Abby Lincoln from Her Lover, Abraham Lincoln

  • Harmony Holiday

The Cloud Corporation, Part 2

An Interview 

  • Timothy Donnelly
  • Maureen N. McLane

Biography of Sleep

Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

  • Aleš Debeljak

The Perspective Fairy

  • Mark Bibbins

Palling Around

  • Gregory Pardlo

Saint Days

  • Angie Mlinko

The Cloud Corporation, Part 1

An Interview

  • Timothy Donnelly
  • Maureen N. McLane

Majestic Interlude

  • Brett Fletcher Lauer

A Storm

  • Laura Kasischke

Prose, Thinly Disguised as an IKEA Superstore

The poetic shows up in more places than we think.

  • Vincent Czyz

At Least

  • Rae Armantrout

The “Illth” of Nations

Enlarging our sense of the economy.

  • David Bollier
  • Jonathan Rowe

Heroisms

  • Dan Beachy-Quick
  • Timothy Donnelly

Floating World

If a travelogue were to arrive as writing, it might read like Maureen N. McLane’s two full-length collections of poems, Same Life and World Enough.

  • Tess Taylor
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