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

Microreview: Sabra Loomis, House Held Together by Winds

Poems told by a little girl who exposes her dominating relatives.

  • Celia Bland

A wellworn inclined ramp for launching vessels, or, body integrity identity disorder.

  • Thomas Hummel

Sea Horse

  • Aleš Šteger
  • Brian Henry

Ruined Interior

  • Suzanne Buffam

Home, Away

  • Margaret Monaghan

Pig’s Heaven Inn

  • Arthur Sze

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in the dark I stare through your cream gauze drape and hope for your shape to pass

  • Tom Bourguignon

Chernobyl

  • Emily Fragos

Poet’s Sampler: Patrick Moran

Introduced by D.A. Powell

  • Patrick Moran
  • D. A. Powell

SPIT AND IMAGE

New poetry from Ashley Capps.

  • Ashley Capps

Every Last Drop

Managing our way out of the water crisis.

  • Frank R. Rijsberman

Wordwatching

A short story. 

  • Gay James

The End of Sexual Identity

Fiction’s new terrain.

  • Stacey D’Erasmo

Working Wonders

Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven.

  • Alan A. Stone

Poets and the People

Reflections on solidarity during wartime.

  • Robert von Hallberg

Out of Defeat

Aimé Césaire’s miraculous words.

  • Colin Dayan

The Crucified Hand

Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart.

  • Raymond McDaniel

Microreview: Peter Waldor, Door to a Noisy Room

Lyrical meditations on familial love, religious tales, and morality.

  • Nicholas Harp

Microreview: Janet McAdams, Feral

Poems that deal smartly with questions of what we lose by learning.

  • Sean Norton

Review: Tendril

By Bin Ramke.

  • Daniel Tiffany

Microreview: Stephen Burt, The Forms of Youth.

20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence.

  • Robert Archambeau

Microreview: Elizabeth Reddin, The Hot Garment of Love Is Insecure

Poems that trace the relationship between knowing and confessing. 

  • Stephanie Anderson

Poet’s Sampler: Ashley Capps

  • Ashley Capps
  • Graham Foust

First Counter-clockwise Canto of the Moebius Strip

  • John Kinsella
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