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

Without End

The poems of Ann Lauterbach’s Or to Begin Again probe the difficult questions—ethical, emotional, political, and even spiritual—of accounting for despair.

  • Richard Deming

Review: The Living Fire

By Edward Hirsch.

  • Piotr Florczyk

Review: The Stranger Manual

By Catie Rosemurgy.

  • Elizabeth Gramm

Review: Clampdown

By Jennifer Moxley.

  • Christopher Schmidt

Review: Full Catastrophe Living

By Zach Savich.

  • Lindsay Turner

Review: Tracer

By Richard Greenfield.

  • Haines Eason

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Poet’s Sampler: Arlo Quint

  • Arlo Quint
  • Anselm Berrigan

Zero Hour

  • Kristine Ong Muslim

In the Golden Age of Counterfeiting

  • Christopher Salerno

Love Poem

  • Sophie Cabot Black

In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys

  • Mary Austin Speaker

What If There Is a Person

  • Steve Healey

False Documents

  • Nicole Walker

Psyche

  • Gustaf Sobin

Everlasting Life

  • John Deming

Particular Flight

  • John Deming

Anniversary

  • Joseph P. Wood

Warhol / Blue Jackie

  • Peter Balakian

Landscape Without the Fall of Icarus

  • Chelsea Jennings

Before the Invention of Perspective in Painting

  • Chelsea Jennings

In the Cordage of the Municipality

  • Brandon Kreitler

Radial

  • Brandon Kreitler

2010 Discovery Poetry Contest Winners

Chelsea Jennings, Brandon Kreitler, Tanya Olson, and Camille Rankine.

  • Boston Review

Still Life with Spurious Picturesque

  • Camille Rankine
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