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

please advise stop, I

  • Rusty Morrison

please advise stop, II

  • Rusty Morrison

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

  • Kevin Young

Poet’s Sampler: Matthew Dickman

  • Matthew Dickman
  • Major Jackson

Tenth Annual Poetry Contest Winner

  • Elizabeth Willis
  • Susan Stewart

Review: Radiant Lyre

: Essays on Lyric Poetry

  • Tess Taylor

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The Art of Dying

A short story.

  • K.J. Bishop

Lastingness

How growing old shapes aesthetic vision.

  • Nicholas Delbanco

Unbeatable Odds

On Rescue Dawn, directed by Werner Herzog.

  • Alan A. Stone

Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah

With Frederick Seidel, some readers will recoil. Others will be seduced by a voice that finds its power in accumulated detail.

  • Celia Bland

Fault Lines

Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw and Sarah Manguso’s Siste Viator.

  • Craig Morgan Teicher

Capital Truths

A review of Giles Goodland's new collection.

  • Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Microreview: Henri Cole, Blackbird and Wolf

A collection of free sonnets.

  • Charlie Clark

Microreview: Aaron Belz, The Bird Hoverer

Impressive, loopy poems.

  • Tony Trigilio

Microreview: Inger Christensen, it

A collection something like a 237-page logic puzzle.

  • Rebecca Porte

Microreview: Anna Rabinowitz, The Wanton Sublime

Poems that attempt to define and redefine the Virgin Mary.

  • Rob Schlegel

Your Worship

  • Val Vinokur

Worse

  • Mary Jo Bang

The Essence

  • Mary Jo Bang

Appendix

  • Edip Cansever

My Life in the Tubes of Survival

  • Roberto Bolaño

Evening Apparition

  • James McCorkle

Poet’s Sampler: Matt Shears

  • Matt Shears
  • Claudia Keelan

The Curse of Modernity

Philip Rieff’s problem with freedom.

  • George Scialabba
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