Looking Back at the Kenyon Review Archives
Editors, KR Contributors, KR Workshop faculty, and other contemporary writers have been invited to respond to work in the Review’s backlist. Each of them has chosen to curate their own list of favorites, to respond to a work or group of works that resonate with or inspire them, to write an new essay or poem, or to create a prompt based on a piece.
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“Nothings! Turtles!”: On “The Neo-Classical Urn” by Robert Lowell
In “The Neo-Classical Urn,” published in The Kenyon Review’s Winter 1964 issue, Robert Lowell recounts something he did one summer as a boy: He caught dozens of turtles and put […]
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Survival and Loss: On “This Is What We Could Have Been” by Roohi Choudhry
“This Is What We Could Have Been” by Roohi Choudhry (fromThe Kenyon Review‘s Nov/Dec 2015 issue), opens with the highest of stakes: Armed extremists have taken over a primary school […]
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“If This Were Fiction”: Tyrese L. Coleman’s “How to Mourn”
From the first sentences, Tyrese L. Coleman’s essay “How to Mourn” turns a somersault, becomes a Möbius strip, an Escher: “If you read my fiction, you will find a character […]
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Lynda Ty-Casper’s “A Small Party in a Garden”
Linda Ty-Casper’s short fiction “A Small Party in a Garden,” published in the Summer 1992 issue of The Kenyon Review, transports the reader, no matter where or when they’re reading […]
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After Wallace Stevens’s “Variations on a Summer Day”
IHeat so devastating thermals reverseand drive wedge-tailed eagles groundward. IIIt’s grotesquely easy to translate the anguishof drying out, the sound effects of combustibility;we see desiccated trees and susurrousgrasses evaporating before […]
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Straight Sets
ok I never went to Paris but that’sok I said I’ll have Paris heredeejay play Romantic Accordion Musicdeejay play whatever starts with a breathy UNE DEUX TROISa lime falls off […]