April 30, 2021
On If by Song by Marcia Karp
Whitman, MA: Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021. 132 pages. $18.00. Drawing on influences from Sappho to the Exeter Book, Marcia Karp’s If by Song uses the poem as a vehicle […]
April 23, 2021
Our Final Words: A Review of Eternal Sentences by Michael McGriff
Fayetteville, AK. University of Arkansas Press. 2021. 80 pages. $17.95. Michael McGriff’s latest collection of poetry, Eternal Sentences, summons a range of notable poets to the reader’s mind—Frank Stanford, Mark […]
April 19, 2021
April 2021 Micro-Reviews
To celebrate National Poetry Month, here’s another round of microreviews! #KRTranslates —KH Ra’ad Abdulqadir. Except for This Unseen Thread. Trans. Mona Kareem. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021. 144 pages. $20.00. In […]
April 16, 2021
The Ductility of Person and Time in Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 108 pages. $17.95. Saddiq Dzukogi’s new collection Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) is a book of poems occasioned by […]
April 9, 2021
On Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing by Julie Marie Wade
Columbus, OH: Mad Creek Books, 2020. 171 pages. $18.95. How can one balance the equation of womanhood, beauty, worth, sexuality, and death? Julie Marie Wade’s tenth book, Just an Ordinary […]
April 2, 2021
On Exclusions by Noah Falck
North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2020. 55 pages. $17.95. “I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to […]
March 26, 2021
New Worlds Forever Measured by the Old: On Burning Province by Michael Prior
Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2020. 80 pages. $16.95. In 2018, Kayla Isomura debuted The Suitcase Project at the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby, British Columbia. An art installation that […]
March 22, 2021
March 2021 Micro-Reviews
Interest in translation within the literary community is growing, and as a result, interest in Kenyon Review micro-reviews of poetry in translation is too. In 2021, we’ll be expanding from […]
March 19, 2021
“Story Comes From Place”: On Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles
New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021. 208 pages. $25.95. In a 2009 Paris Review interview, Annie Proulx asserted that “story comes from place,” a theorem that she proves […]
March 12, 2021
On We Do Not Live in Vain by Selva Casal
Translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas. El Paso, TX: Veliz Books, 2020. 90 pages. $18.00. In her translator’s note, Jeannine Pitas writes of her friendship with Selva Casal, “There is something […]
March 5, 2021
On Asylum by Jill Bialosky
Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections. New York, NY: Knopf/Random House, 2020. 144 pages. $27.00. How are we to discuss a thing containing multitudes without reducing […]
February 26, 2021
On Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2020. 224 pages. $27.99. For those of us who have spent many years reading Natasha Trethewey’s poems, the basic facts of her mother’s murder at the […]