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: Ken Cheng, Juvenilia

A collection that walks the high wire between deeply felt trauma and poetic artifact.

  • Sumita Chakraborty

Microreview: Monica Youn, Ignatz

Humor and love act like cat and mouse in this collection.

  • Nick Admussen

Microreview: Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities

Poems whose power to depict the zeitgeist rivals the iconic image making of Dorothea Lange.

  • Virginia Konchan

Poet’s Sampler: Monica Mody

  • Monica Mody
  • Joyelle McSweeney

invasion of the body snatchers

  • Nick Flynn

forgetting something

  • Nick Flynn

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Nativity

  • Carolyn Forché

The Insentientist

  • Stephanie Adams-Santos

Poem In a Book That Was Never Opened

  • Timothy O’Keefe

My Daughter’s Body

  • Jennifer Franklin

Follow

  • Rae Gouirand

In Wind: Blunt: Closer

  • Rae Gouirand

Underlight

  • Aaron McCollough

Underlight

  • Aaron McCollough

Snow Globe With Frank O’Hara and Arboretum

  • Joni Wallace

Entrance Liturgy

  • Dawn Marie Knopf

Back When Post-War Vienna

  • Kyle Thompson

Song of Solomon Transformed My Life

Dave Eggers interviews Junot Díaz

  • Junot Díaz
  • Dave Eggers

Life Work

Nicholson Baker grows up

  • John Crowley

Forage

  • Amelia Klein

The Side of Love

In his poems and essays, Dan Chiasson proves equally adept at rigorous self-interrogation and at an intellectual probing of the outer world.

  • Piotr Florczyk

Urban Legends

It's time to rethink the concept of the "inner city."

  • William Rankin

Books After Amazon

Amazon isn’t just bad for cities; it’s also bad for books.

  • Onnesha Roychoudhuri

Suppose You’re an Idiot

Mark Twain tells his own story.

  • Roger Boylan
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