November 2012

What Are You Reading This Weekend?

Could anything be better than a good weekend read? KR is pleased to send you exciting fiction, poetry, and essays every Friday to start your weekend right!

In case you missed it, KR’s new Weekend Reads began this past Friday with the first section of Amit Majmudar’s brilliant novella, Azazil. Check it out! (It’s a pleasure to read during the week, too.)

Why We Chose It

By G. C. Waldrep, Editor at Large

“Elegy” by Katie Peterson

David Baker and I both admired Katie Peterson’s first collection, This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), and when I saw new work from Peterson in the KR queue, I nabbed it immediately. What always strikes me about Peterson’s work is how exceptionally intelligent her lyric voice is: and by “intelligent” I mean ethical intelligence and emotional intelligence as well as the intellect as we more commonly define it. There is a precision in both her thought and her feeling, a precision that carries over into the almost lapidary specificity of her images and breaks.

The ninth annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers is now accepting entries! The prize, which is open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world, is juried by David Baker, KR’s poetry editor.

A Conversation with Anna Journey

This collaborative interview with the poet Anna Journey took place during the seminar, “Contemporary First Books of Poetry,” a graduate course for students in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas, taught by Davis McCombs. For the course, the graduate students read eight books and corresponded, via email, with the poets studied. McCombs has taught the course five times before, using new books in each instance.

The Kenyon Review, Winter 1946, Vol. VIII, No. 1

Mr. Edwards and the Spider

by Robert Lowell

I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;

Silent Dragon

by Rafael Acevedo
Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena

            in Borges, in origami

            Unfortunately
the last dragon travels the streets of Tokyo
trailing a wake of escaped paper,
thinking about the future of the yen.
It has no fire left in its mouth for the poor,
or maybe the devil took the last bit of fire
for his sulfur house.

Click here to finish reading this poem.

KROnline is the online complement of The Kenyon Review. New fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews are published on a biweekly basis. Check back often to read some of the most cutting-edge material you’ll find anywhere on the web. Click here to see our latest offering.

Now or Never: The Writer and the Age

October 19, 2012 — Amit Majmudar

One thing that’s underestimated about writing is how now-or-never it is, how suddenly it crowds out of a few people. Many of the most powerful, permanent “ages” in literature have actually spanned less than a single writer’s lifetime—frequently, and I have no idea why this is, three or four decades.

Contents Nov. 2012
Weekend Reads
Why We Chose It
Grodd Prize
Anna Journey
From the Archives
From KROnline
From the Blog

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