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

Icicles Tine Barnward from the Barn’s Shallow Eave

  • Rob Schlegel

Poet’s Sampler: Brandon Shimoda

  • Brandon Shimoda
  • Karen Volkman

God

Philosophers weigh in.

  • Alex Byrne

Up High in the Air

A short story. 

  • Laura van den Berg

Worldmaker

Remembering Thomas Disch.

  • John Crowley

Poison Flow

Edward St. Aubyn takes on the English upper class.

  • Neel Mukherjee

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Review: The Monster Loves his Labyrinth and That Little Something

Two new books by Charles Simic.

  • Nicholas Harp

Review: Bad Bad

By Chelsey Minnis.

  • Sasha Steensen

Review: Fall

By Amy Newman.

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

Review: Brenda Is in the Room

By Craig Morgan Teicher.

  • Tara Neelakantappa Safronoff

Every Leaf, Every Tree

An excerpt from Neel Mukherjee's forthcoming graphic novel. With art by Tom Uglow.

  • Neel Mukherjee

Now There Are Two Poems in Which We Are Kissing

  • Rebecca Bridge

The Mourner’s Hope

Martha Nussbaum’s bat mitzvah talk, on grief and the foundations of justice.

  • Martha C. Nussbaum

Bad News

Authenticity and the South Asian political novel.

  • Amitava Kumar

The Weight of Grief

A short story.

  • Kristin S. vanNamen

Uproars

Leslie Epstein’s magic.

  • John Crowley

What Does Woody Want?

Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

  • Alan A. Stone

Sarah Arvio

Winner of the eleventh annual Boston Review poetry contest, introduced by John Koethe

  • Sarah Arvio
  • John Koethe

Listening to Poetry

Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me.

  • Zack Finch

Wanderer

Jay Wright’s The Presentable Art of Reading Absence and Polynomials and Pollen

  • Aaron McCollough

Microreview: Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

 Sixty-four lyrics written in the year following the death of Bang's son.

  • Robert Schnall

Microreview: Lisa Samuels, The Invention of Culture

Poetry honeycombed with questions, doubts, promises.

  • Fred Muratori

Microreview: Rosmarie Waldrop, Curves to the Apple

One of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry. 

  • Andy Frazee

Microreview: Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story

A book-length meditation on the death of Morrison's father.

  • Rebecca Porte
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