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A Tribute to Amy Blumenthal
 All of us at the Kenyon Review mourn the recent passing of Amy Blumenthal, who had been a member of our family and team for many years. Amy was a superb writer and editor, possessing a keen eye and the gentlest, wryest of wits. But more than that, we will miss her warmth and wisdom, her ready laugh. By dedicating the July/August 2017 issue of KR to her memory we offer but a token of our deep esteem and sorrow.
—David Lynn, the David Banks Editor of the Kenyon Review
Why We Chose It
BY G.C. WALDREP, EDITOR AT LARGE
“Russian Airstrike, Homs, January 2016” and “US Airstrike, Tokhar, July 2016” by Brian Russell appear in the July/Aug 2017 issue of KROnline.
One of the problems in contemporary poetry that I return to again and again is the swift hinge that links beauty (however defined) and violence. We live in a world with an extravagant capacity for what the human project regards as beautiful—but also an equally extravagant capacity for cruelty and horror. How does the lyric poet maneuver between these two? Read the rest of “Why We Chose It.”
A Note from the KR Writers Workshop
BY TYLER MILLS, PETER TAYLOR FELLOW
 The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop is the place to come to be challenged, to write your heart out, and to meet a wonderful community of people. Here, the workshop space is a lively, supportive, creative community. We’ve all been generating new poems together, and the feedback I’ve received on my new work is invaluable. Read more about the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.
July/Aug 2017 Issue Now Available!
 The new issue of KR is now available! This issue features fiction by Charles Johnson and Elizabeth Wetmore; poetry by Rae Armantrout, Lawrence Joseph, and Meghan O’Rourke; nonfiction by Robert Hahn, Wyatt Prunty, and Jeffrey Meyers, and much more. Look for the issue in your mailbox, on newsstands, and in bookstores, or read our new digital version on your mobile device! Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!
New in KR Podcasts
 This month, travel writer Thomas Swick speaks with Dan Laskin about the art and craft of travel writing, the literary qualities that distinguish travel literature from journalism, and the ways that both planning and serendipity produce compelling travel stories. Swick is the author, most recently, of The Joys of Travel—And Stories that Illuminate Them, published by Skyhorse Publishing. Listen to it!
From KROnline: On the Act of Arrival
BY W. SCOTT OLSEN
 There is always that step, that motion, that willing of the body into a new space.
Late fall in New York City, a bright warm day following a day of rain and wind, I’m wandering midtown streets because I have a hunch, an idea I need to test, a moment I’d like to save. I’ve been watching people arrive. I’ve been watching them rise out of the ground on subway station steps, and I’ve been watching them get off trains. I have been watching faces of joy, curiosity, wonder, pain, fear, frustration, love, hope, and despair. Read the rest of this essay
From the KR Blog: What Text and Image Have to Say to Each Other
BY CAROLINE HAGOOD
June 26, 2017
 I have been bewitched by the bringing together of text and image in art for as long as I can remember. A film or photograph can convey something that words alone cannot and vice versa. And if you combine the two, a whole other imagistic universe opens before your eyes. I decided to ask Dr. Elisabeth Frost, a poet and professor who works in text and image and literally wrote the book on feminist avant-garde poetry, about the bringing together of these two worlds. Read the conversation.
A Micro-Conversation with Katy Didden
 Seven of Katy Didden’s The Lava on Iceland erasure poems appear in the May/June 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review and KROnline.
What was your original impetus for writing Lava Erasures?
What does it mean to write in the voice of lava? For my first book, The Glacier’s Wake, I wrote a series of persona poems in the voice of a glacier, a wasp, and a sycamore. The personae began with the wasp. At a writing residency, my studio neighbor took a shine to a lethargic wasp that floated around the halls at eye level, freaking us out. The day it died, she scooped up its body and slid it under my door on an index card on which she’d written: RIP Rafael. For a week, I studied the wasp’s body and wrote a series of poems in which the wasp defines things, like archangels and Renaissance painters. Read the rest of the interview. |
