Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

Read

Spring 2010 • Vol. XXXII No. 2 • Poetry |

Poem in Which Billie Holiday Is Barely Heard

  Her voice a velvet backdrop
to mood-thirsty sex or scrubbing
   bathroom tiles. A giddy All of Me
  gives way to Strange Fruit, which turns

  to gauze we mostly ignore
over chorizo-stuffed quail, little spoons
   teeming with sorbet, talk of wax-jobs,
  committee snafus. For all I ever hear,

Already have an account? Log in

Join KR for even more to read.

Sign up for a free account and read any five pieces a month.
Sign Up and Read for Free



Or become a subscriber today and get complete, immediate access to our digital archives at every subscription level.
Kenyon Review logo
Matt Donovan is the author of the collection of essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016) as well as two collections of poetry – Vellum (Mariner, 2007) and Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press, 2017). He is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Creative Capital Grant, an NEA Fellowship, and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. He’s currently writing a book about American gun culture, and collaborating on the chamber opera Inheritance about the life of Sarah Winchester.

Read More

Audubon Diptych

By Matt Donovan

I. Wherein the Swallows Instruct Us on Pleasure Because they daubed with poppy sap the stricken eyes of their young & because each thin body, it was believed, contained a […]

Subscribe

Your free registration with The Kenyon Review includes access to exclusive content, early access to program registration, and more.

Donate

With your support, we’ll continue 
to cultivate talent and publish extraordinary literature from diverse voices around the world.