June 3, 2019
Kenyon Review’s Summer Reading Recommendations
Forget January. Avid readers know that the time for personal resolutions is the cusp of summer, when warm breezes, lingering light, and the prospect of vacation invite the mind to […]
June 2, 2019
VERVE {IN} VERSE: IN CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS JACKSON
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. […]
May 29, 2019
Meditations in an Emergency: Ilya Kaminsky, Mad Men, and the Backdrop of War
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war. So ends […]
May 24, 2019
An Artist’s Life: An Interview with Marcia Butler, author of Pickle’s Progress
Marcia Butler’s debut novel, Pickle’s Progress, has been hailed by Michael Schaub of NPR as “Surprising and audacious…. Pickle’s Progress is a deeply weird novel that succeeds because of Butler’s willingness […]
May 14, 2019
On Richard Powers’s The Overstory
It’s an almost universally accepted notion now that good literature comes down to character. Scholars have long argued that the rise of the novel in Europe coincides with the rise […]
May 8, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – May
The most important hip-hop “crossover” event of my youth was not Aerosmith and Run-DMC or Anthrax and Public Enemy or even the Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan tour. […]
April 26, 2019
In Defense of a Literary Canon
Mild controversy erupted on Twitter early this month after Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg released a list of his ten favorite books. To me, the list felt a little like […]
April 22, 2019
Do We Write for Others or Ourselves?
Last year, I wrote a piece for this blog about Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle,” arguing that it was the ultimate consolation for a writer, because it […]
April 20, 2019
On Slow Reading, Considering, and Consuming
It’s long been understood that going to an art museum doesn’t necessarily mean one desires to look at art, at least not for prolonged, potentially edifying periods. Articles like Artnet’s […]
April 13, 2019
Review: Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems
Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Poems. Translated by William Radice. Penguin Modern Classics (India), 208 pages. Some writers write different things the same way over and over again. All of Emily […]
April 11, 2019
“This thing I use to stay alive” – An Interview with Poet Husnaa Hashim
Husnaa Hashim is the author of Honey Sequence published by The Head & The Hand, a nonprofit, independent publishing company and writers’ workshop based in Philadelphia. She was the 2017-2018 Youth […]
April 5, 2019
On Mixed Metaphors in Gorgani’s Vis and Ramin
To almost all writers today, the term “mixed metaphor” has only negative connotations, referring to a classic type of bad and thoughtless writing, when a writer without realizing it employs […]