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

Read

Summer 1998 • Vol. XX No. 3/4 • Poetry |

Hydraulics

When a young man dedicates his life
To hydraulics, he can grow into a godhead
Overnight. Because ram, pile, lift, jack,
& pressure gauge own this man’s tongue,

Hercules goes on a long vacation.
Hera’s magic finds him on Saturday
Nights when he’s drinking rum & Coke,
But Amazons on Hollywood & Vine remember

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.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s seventeen books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), Warhorses, and most recently The Chameleon Couch and Testimony. His many honors include the William Faulkner Prize (Universite Rennes, France), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play. He teaches at New York University.

Read More

A Prayer

By Yusef Komunyakaa

Great Ooga-Booga, in your golden pavilion beside the dung heap, please don't let me die in a public place. I still see the man on the café floor at the […]

K’rar

By Yusef Komunyakaa

We have this to call to the dead among the living, this wooden triangle, its belly a gourd-resonator the size of a man's cupped hands inverted, in prayer & war. […]

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.