November 14, 2018
“The need to find beauty”: A Conversation with Allison Benis White
Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the 2018 Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize […]
November 7, 2018
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – November
“I never got poetry,” someone says to me again. And I sigh. Because I never got it either—at least, not until I learned to stop worrying about “getting it.” In […]
November 7, 2018
“Spare this body, set fire to another”: Speech & Silence in Work by Kaveh Akbar, Brenna Womer, & Henk Rossouw
In the one volume of writing that he published during his lifetime, Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Indeed, grammar, and […]
November 6, 2018
On Titles
It’s always amusing to read about the original titles of famous novels. A few years ago an infographic from Jonkers Rare Books made the rounds on the Internet and revealed […]
November 6, 2018
An Interview With Maryse Meijer
Carmen Maria Machado wrote of Maryse Meijer’s Northwood, which comes out this week, “This strange and beautiful novella has everything I want: formal play, myths and fairy tales, the politics […]
November 2, 2018
The Poetics of Disbelief
In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously coined the term “suspension of disbelief,” meaning a willingness to silence one’s critical faculties and believe in something purely conjectural for the sake of […]
October 26, 2018
Re-Reading “Anne of Green Gables” as an Adult
In Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery explores how the style of the writing and the ideology of the characters form the atmosphere of a literary work. This focus on […]
October 26, 2018
On Character Names
Picking a character name is often as hard as writing the first line of a new novel or story—the kind of specific and essential task that often halts any momentum […]
October 25, 2018
E.M. Forster on Fantasy and Prophecy
There is a strange distinction made in the later chapters of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a collection of lectures the author gave at Cambridge in 1927. I’ve already […]
October 22, 2018
Clifton, Pain, and Poetry
If you haven’t read Lucille Clifton’s “Wishes for Sons” before, you might assume from the title that it’s a poem about hoping for sons – a mother’s prayerful request for a […]
October 22, 2018
VERVE {IN} VERSE: IN CONVERSATION WITH MONICA LEWIS
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my new poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off […]
October 17, 2018
W.D. Snodgrass’s “Heart’s Needle”
With their radically revealing autobiographical tone and their excavation of trauma, the poems in W.D. Snodgrass’s collection, Heart’s Needle, are undoubtedly confessional. What’s interesting about the poems is that this […]