October 2015

Why We Chose It

BY GEETA KOTHARI, NONFICTION EDITOR

“Mēl,” by Amy Wright, appears in the Sept/Oct 2015 issue of the Kenyon Review

Halfway through her essay “Mēl,” Amy Wright sits down to a freshly prepared bowl of cricket risotto. She lifts a leg to her mouth like “a miniature frog leg. The taste is similar, meaning mild and easily dominated by salt and white wine, but the texture is much lighter. It conjures a flake of rainbow trout or butter bean that melts like an ice sliver away from its skin, disappearing faster than a crystal on a sorbet spoon.” The cricket’s delicacy, the way it invokes both the familiar and unfamiliar, reflects the essay as a whole. This meal, like the essay, is an adventure, full of surprises and delights. Continue reading “Why We Chose It.”

Submit to the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers

The thirteenth annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers will begin accepting entries in November. The prize, which is open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world, is juried by David Baker, KR’s poetry editor. Learn more about the contest.

KR Reading Period Now Open!

Kenyon Review is now accepting submissions online. The submissions period will continue through December 15, 2015. Short fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and translations will be accepted for both the magazine and KROnline from a single pool of submissions. Click here to access our submission guidelines.

New in KR Podcasts

In this month’s podcast, essayist and editor Dinty W. Moore talks to Editor at Large Natalie Shapero about the line between comedy and mockery, the line between truth and memory, and the most challenging subject for a humor writer to take on. Download the podcast.

From KROnline: My Sister is in Pain

BY BONNIE JO CAMPBELL

Unbearable pain when she gets up in the morning to go to work, when she goes to bed at night, and when she sleeps, she sleeps in pain and wakes up in pain again and dresses in her stretch-waist pants and bright complicated sweaters, heats up meals from packages, substitutes low-fat margarine for butter, sucralose for sugar, and smokes cigarettes in pain on her porch, while squirrels scramble like idiots up trees, and cars without mufflers vomit smoke and clatter through this neighborhood of potholes and broken windows, where kids steal anything to sell for money to buy meth.
Continue reading this story on KROnline.

Keats and the Elgin Marbles

BY AMY CLAMPITT

From The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring, 1983, Vol. V, No. 2

      for Frederick Turner

Openings. Winandermere and Derwentwater.
The Elgin Marbles. That last evening
at the Crown in Liverpool, with George
and his new wife, imagination failed

    —and still fails: what can John Keats
    have had to do with a hacked clearing
    in the Kentucky underbrush? How could
    Mnemosyne herself, the mother of the Muse,
    have coped with that uncultivated tangle,
    catbrier and poison ivy, chiggers,
    tent caterpillars, cottonmouths,
    the awful gurglings and chirrings
    of the dark?

Continue reading this poem.

From the KR Blog: On Books and Silence: Why I Cannot Pray on Rosh Hashanah

BY ROSEBUD BEN-ONI

September 13, 2015

There are three shelves on a bookcase that I’ve avoided for almost eight years, books that I’d stacked and shoved into suitcases upon leaving Jerusalem, having given away clothing, CDs, shoes, two lovely stone and silver-plated Shabbat candle holders, any kitsch, gift and collectible from friends and my ex-girlfriend, all in a very brusque and final manner, as if each were their actual fingers so easily disentangled from my own. Read the rest of this blog post.

A Micro-Conversation with David Wojahn

David Wojahn’s essay “Devotion and Witness” appears in the Sept/Oct 2015 issue of the Kenyon Review

Your piece in this issue of KR is a fascinating review of two poetry anthologies with seemingly disparate projects. What was your original impetus for pairing these two books in the same piece?

Well, the pairing was suggested by David Baker. I couldn’t help but think it was something of a dare, insofar as there are scarcely any ostensible similarities between the two anthologies, save that both treated highly specialized topics—and vexed ones, politics and religion. As I say in the review, these are precisely the two subjects that etiquette books warn you to avoid bringing up at a Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. This made for an interesting challenge. Read the rest of the interview.

OCTOBER 2015
CONTENTS
Why We Chose It
Grodd Prize
Reading Period
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Archive
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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