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

Wear a Red Hat, I Will Too

  • Christopher DeWeese

Dying in the Development

  • D. A. Powell

Ax the al— to

  • Stacy Kidd

Obama’s Chicago Tactics

The Chicago way of doing politics.

  • Michael Gecan

“Civilizing Haiti”

It is now eight days since an earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince.

  • Colin Dayan

Martin Luther King Day

  • William Varner

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Squill

  • Ange Mlinko

The Jewish Question

Alan Stone reviews the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man.

  • Alan A. Stone

Smothered to Smithereens

The poetics of motherhood

  • Stephanie Burt

Lord, Hear My Voice

Bin Ramke has a dedicated readership, but it is not a particularly large one. His work is probably too strange, too difficult, and too huddled around a particular vision of the self and the world to appeal to a broad audience.

  • Craig Morgan Teicher

Nothing To Fear

Misreading Muslim immigration in Europe.

  • John R. Bowen

Microreview: Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs

Re-imagining the poet as detective and philosopher in one. 

  • Mara Pastor

Review: Zero Readership

By Filip Marinovich.

  • Zach Savich

Review: Days of Unwilling

By Cal Bedient.

  • Samuel Amadon

Review: Skirmish

By Dobby Gibson.

  • Elisabeth Divis

Review: Word Comix

By Charlie Smith.

  • Elizabeth Gramm

Poet’s Sampler: Christopher Kondrich

  • Christopher Kondrich
  • Mark Strand

Description of a Badly Drawn Horse

  • Daniel Johnson

Vault

  • Alice Jones

Idyll

  • Alice Jones

Prometheus

  • William Wadsworth

My Herculaneum

  • Jennifer Franklin

The Cake

  • Mark Irwin

The Engineer of Vertical Frontiers

  • Cathy Park Hong
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