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

The Red Cipher

  • Craig Morgan Teicher

Diabolus in Musica

  • Christina Mengert

Antietam Primer

  • Mary Pinard

Poet’s Sampler: Marsha Pomerantz

  • Marsha Pomerantz

Ten Vices

  • James Longenbach

Private Arrangements

“Recognizing sharia” in England

  • John R. Bowen

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Concerning the Correct Way to Make Cabbage

A short story.

  • D.S. Sulaitis

Fateful Gates

The lives of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

  • Roger Boylan

The Collaborator

On the writings of V. S. Naipaul.

  • James Wallenstein

Condemned

Stephen Daldry’s The Reader.

  • Alan A. Stone

After Ariel

Celebrating the poetry of the women’s movement.

  • Honor Moore

What Country Is This?

Rereading LeRoi Jones’s The Dead Lecturer.

  • Adrienne Rich

Song and Silence

My Fanny Howe

  • Maureen N. McLane

Fighting Words

Lyn Hejinian's Saga/Circus

  • Joyelle McSweeney

Love Letters

The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  • Cecily Parks

Review: Letters to a Stranger

By Thomas James.

  • Tess Taylor

Review: Firefly Under the Tongue

Selected Poems of Coral Bracho.

  • Alan Gilbert

Review: Planets on Tables

By Bonnie Costello.

  • Robert Archambeau

Review: The Cow

By Ariana Reines.

  • Emily Wolahan

Review: The Most of It

By Mary Ruefle.

  • Kathleen Rooney

Review: Dear Darkness

By Kevin Young.

  • Jason Tandon

Review: Sources

By Devin Johnston.

  • Jordan Davis

Review: The History of Anonymity

By Jennifer Chang.

  • Kristina Marie Darling

Finally April and the Birds Are Falling Out of the Air with Joy

  • Anne Carson
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