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

North Cambridge

  • John Koethe

Interview under Hypnosis

  • Jennifer Militello

Pure Indonesia

  • Allan Peterson

Stripes of Knowing How Much Further I Had to Go

  • Amy Newlove Schroeder

The Lost Tin Myth

  • Lytton Smith

Poet’s Sampler: Youna Kwak

  • Youna Kwak
  • Joanna Klink

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Desaliento

The winner of Boston Review’s 15th annual fiction contest.

  • Patricia Engel

Justify the Enemy

Becoming human in South Africa.

  • Zakes Mda

Badlands

The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men Miramax Films (2007)

  • Alan A. Stone

This Ecstatic Nation

Learning from Emily Dickinson after 9/11

  • Maureen N. McLane

Ghosts

Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract

  • Andrew Zawacki

The Writing Cure

Don Share's Squandermania

  • Erin Belieu

Microreview: Ange Mlinko, Starred Wire

A collection that reveals a bizzaro America.

  • Travis Nichols

Microreview: Jon Woodward, Rain

Poems that begin with the unexceptional and arrive at something transcendent.

  • Craig Morgan Teicher

Microreview: Laynie Browne, Daily Sonnets

151 sonnets about motherhood.

  • Cecily Parks

Microreview: Peter Conners, Of Whiskey and Winter

Prose poems with affection for the unbeautiful. 

  • Nicholas Harp

Microreview: Benjamin Friedlander, The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes

Bringing together Friedlander’s unpublished works.

  • Aaron McCollough

Grace

  • Desirée Alvarez

Torso of an Unknown Soldier

  • Bridgette Bates

(Dialogue in a country graveyard)

  • Matevi Yankelevich

centerfold

  • D. A. Powell

When the Moon Comes Up

  • Barbara Claire Freeman

Hover, Coo

  • Frances Justine Post

The World

  • Marie Howe
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