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.

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Criticism, Poem, Memoir, Short Story

Browse Criticism by Topic

Fiction, Film and TV, Literature, Music, Poetry, Visual Art

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Is the end of Wikipedia near?

  • Evgeny Morozov

The Pale Side of the Leaves

  • D. Nurkse

God, the Army, and PTSD

Is religion an obstacle to treatment?

  • Tara McKelvey

Purely Coincidental

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

  • Alan A. Stone

Where’s Your Sense of Humor?

Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen.

  • Aura Estrada
  • Esther Allen

Review: Body Clock

By Eleni Sikelianos.

  • W. Scott Cheney

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Poet’s Sampler: Broc Rossell

  • Broc Rossell
  • Dan Beachy-Quick

Leap Into Light

  • Robert Huddleston

Review: The Isle of the Signatories

By Marjorie Welish.

  • Christopher Schmidt

Poem Beginning to End

  • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Tattoo

  • Joseph Fasano

The Buddhist

The more it hurts, the wiser the Buddhist becomes.

  • Dorthe Nors
  • Martin Aitken

Fool’s Gold

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno.

  • Alan A. Stone

Father Benides

  • Adam Day

Review: FAQ:

By Ben Doller.

  • Noah Eli Gordon

A Food We Once Ate Is Mentioned by Name

  • Catie Rosemurgy

Women’s Bathroom, College of Arts

  • Jane Zwart

Dear Modifications

  • Trey Sager

Microreview: Robert Creeley, On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay

The final say of a poet who always spoke at the edges of the sayable.

  • Zack Finch

Review: Micrographia

By Emily Wilson.

  • Katie Peterson

Grief Abstracts

  • Julie Carr

Wonder Land

In Lennon's novels, it is not magic that is cruel, but rather its illusory promise.

  • G.C. Waldrep

Chrysalis

Translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik

  • Izabela Filipiak
  • Karen Kovacik

Review: The Incentive of the Maggot

By Ron Slate.

  • Susan Barba
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