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

Letter from the Boreal Hermitess

  • Jennifer Chang

Poet’s Sampler: Cyrus Console

  • Cyrus Console
  • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Microreview: Paisley Rekdal, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope

Brilliantly-made poems that are complicated, constantly in flux, and fragmented.

  • Victoria Chang

Microreview: Matthew Zapruder, The Pajamaist

Poems presented as objects of contemplation.

  • Kathleen Rooney

Microreview: Jaime Saenz, The Night

The Night redefines what it means to be illuminated by anatomizing the experience of being enveloped in darkness.

  • Aaron Belz

Left Behind

Romanticizing Germany's Urban Guerillas

  • Paul Hockenos

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A Baby Is a Baby Is a Baby

A short story.

  • Matthew Stuart

The Cynic

A short story. 

  • Charles Johnson

Something for Myself

Haruki Murakami’s strange world of hope.

  • Catalina Holguín

Making Monsters

In the Valley of Elah, directed by Paul Haggis.

  • Alan A. Stone

His Face in the Mirror

On the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert.

  • W. Martin

The Testament of Mr. Cogito

Zbigniew Herbert and the limits of the political.

  • Alissa Valles

Enlivened Parties

Two new collections from Joanna Klink and Geoffrey G. O'Brien.

  • Reginald Shepherd

Microreview: Susan Briante, Pioneers in the Study of Motion

“Unstable love, detached love, underperforming love, neo-liberal love.”

  • Simon DeDeo

The City Visible

Chicago Poetry for the New Century

  • Fred Muratori

Microreview: Cole Swenson, The Glass Age

Poems that sit alongside Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze.

  • Celia Bland

Microreview: Christine Garren, The Piercing

Unflinchingly severe poems.

  • Craig Morgan Teicher

Microreview: James Longenbach, Draft of a Letter

Poems that balance verbal paucity with connotative richness.

  • Jennifer Chang

Variants on Binding

  • Stephanie Anderson

Red Glass Necklace

  • John Spaulding

The Whole False History of Human Beings

  • Arthur Vogelsang

A Skeleton I Made From Skeletons I Found

  • Scott Topper

The Ghost Back Home

  • Fred Muratori

The Old Bills

  • John Updike
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