One Hundred Definitions of Poetry, Each Unsound
H. L. Hix
A mistaking of events for conditions.
The Constitution that constitutes what precedes any constitution.
Willing suspension of disbelief and of any other participant in sound judgment.
Civis, dreaming itself animus.
…
Square Black Key
Margo Berdeshevsky
The Norman coast woman, no longer in her middle American housecoat as she remembers it, now naked under fuchsia silk, recalls the old robe on its peg in once-upon Akron. Was it called a housecoat? Yes. A thing to knot and tie. Oui. …
A Brief Sexual History and Its Catalyst
Jason Nemec
I had sex for the first time when I was fourteen. I can sum it up nice and neat for you like they do at the end of that game Clue: Jimmy Mendelson. In the shed behind his house. With a rubber I stole from one of my dad’s tackle boxes.…
The Importance of Being Difficult: Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems
Rachel Abramowitz
Charles Bernstein is no stranger to the “difficult” poem: as one of the co-creators of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in the 1970s, Bernstein has made a career of discombobulation.…
The Mother Warns the Tornado; On the Origins of the Tornado
Catherine Pierce
The Mother Warns the Tornado
Scene: a bathtub, dry. The noise outside inaudible
behind the baby’s wails.
I know I’ve already had more than I deserve.
These lungs that rise and fall without effort,
the husband who sets free house lizards,
this red-doored ranch, my mother on the phone,
the fact that I can eat anything—gouda, popcorn,
massaman curry—without worry.
…
Predators
Kent Nelson
The lynx steps from the forest and scratches down the snowy bank onto the lake ice blown clean by wind. The animal is as gray as the low clouds that nose down over the foothills, a change from the last…
Into the Foreign Tissue: Anja Utler’s engulf — enkindle
Dan Rosenberg
Translated by Kurt Beals. Providence, RI: Burning Deck Press, 2010. 93 pages. $14. engulf — enkindle, the English-speaking world’s introduction to contemporary German poet Anja Utler, is full of poems that look broken. Colons and dashes violate the syntax, banging…
Measured Abandon: Mark Doty’s The Art of Description and Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness
Jeremy Bass
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010. 137/167 pages. $12 each. Attention. Description. Subtext. Ending. For the past five years, Graywolf Press has been releasing instructional titles under its Art of series, each pocket-sized guide an exploration of one writer’s thoughts on…
Chateaubriand; Nothing to Undo That Can’t Be Done Again
Angela Voras-Hills
Chateaubriand
Love me here, a tangle in the wire, complicate
my limbs with your mouth. Like the trail,
we’re a handful of breadcrumbs, the boy
whispering himself to sleep at the library,
the book slipping from his lap. . . .
…
The Last Four Seasons
Meghan Kenny
Autumn In Hakusan-cho, the maple leaves turned red and orange and yellow. Hiro Tanaguchi thought of many places other than where he was and of many people whom he’d left or who had left him. He was a man who…
On East-West Dialogue
Adania Shibli
I arrive at Lydd airport. At passport control, I present my passport through a small opening in the glass panel to the officer sitting behind it. We wait a little until first three security personnel arrive, then four others—two policemen and a policewoman, …
Ducks on the Pond: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
Jesse Donaldson
In the late 1990s, I moonlighted as a slap-hitting second baseman for the Kenyon College Lords, one of the most historically inept sports teams in NCAA history. I came into Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, a first novel about baseball at a liberal arts college, with suspicion.…
Wild Birds Unlimited
Lucia Perillo
Because the old feeder feeds nothing
but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned
how to hang so it swings sideways until
gravity takes the seed—I bumble down
…
Care
Karin Lin-Greenberg
You’re a bus driver now. And tonight is Halloween, which means drunk college students riding the bus to and from parties. Eventually someone will make a mess—vomit, vampire makeup smeared on a window, a can of soda sloshed onto the…
Stories in the Best Way: Caitlin Horrocks’ This is Not Your City
Aimee Pokwatka
Caitlin Horrocks has chops. In her debut collection of short stories, This Is Not Your City, there are sensitively rendered characters, nimble shifts in points of view, and a diversity of voices that lends the collection an air of uncommon maturity. …
“It’s the silence which has chosen me”: Claude Royet-Journoud’s The Whole of Poetry is Preposition
John Steen
Keith Waldrop’s translation of Claude Royet-Journoud’s volume of fragments and aphorisms, The Whole of Poetry is Preposition, is only the most recent product of a transatlantic friendship and collaboration that spans nearly forty years.…
My Brother, My Gastroenterologist
W. M. Lobko
When it comes to roaches my pug isn’t fussy,
her eyes as black as their glossy shells which
as she roams she erases, slurps as in some
awful Reverse Connect-The-Dots, think Icky
Ms. Pac-Man, as thanks I’ll order her a pink bow
whereas I am the empty blue box in the center
where treats like cherries should glisten.…
The Beautiful Line
W. Scott Olsen
Tell me about the beginning of desire. We hear a story, or a question, or a challenge, someone else’s adventure—someone we know or someone so deep in a history even Marco Polo would find ancient—and that story lingers. It settles…
The Beauty of Waste, the Waste of Beauty: Anna Moschovakis’ You and Three Others are Approaching a Lake
Kristen Evans
The poems in Anna Moschovakis’ second collection investigate philosophical and ethical questions about morality, labor, and art, as well as the very terms we use to approach these fundamental human experiences. Often, we categorize our experiences in discrete units, to better understand and order the world around us.…
The Purple Suit
John Kinsella
It was two years since Solomon’s father’s accident. Two years to the day when the invitation to the harvest ball arrived. The ball was to be a formal affair—one sponsored by the Shire from its mysterious entertainment fund, various town…
Winter in the Park
John Frederick Nims
Lagoons are shrunk and walkable as concrete,
The little islands accessible now
That in June were a green secret the sunburnt lovers
Bumped with their rented prow.
…
Life, Lines: Susan Howe’s That This and Julie Carr’s Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
Kascha Semonovitch
The beginnings and endings of poems must have something to do with the beginnings and endings of lives. At least this is the suggestion made by two recent books, one by Susan Howe, That This, and the other by Julie Carr, Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines.…
A Little Nightmare; Shackleford after a Hurricane
Lee Bradbury
A Little Nightmare
We call them writing spiders. It dines
in its fat, white zigzag, green and yellow,
lightning striped black with those spindly,
burnt crooklegs needled on their lines.
…
The Greatest Slut in the World
Tamara Shores
That was the winter Christine and I vowed to become anorexics. The only times I felt close to my sister were when we were crying into each others’ arms and making deals of one kind or another. Our big boobs…
Racial Profiling: Three First Books by Latino Poets
Craig Santos Perez
Arizona law SB 1070 makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally and requires immigrants to carry documents proving they legally reside in the United States. Not only will SB 1070 lead to racial profiling and violate many citizens’ civil rights, the law is also an inhumane response to the causes of immigration and the violent situation of the U.S.-Mexico border. …
Come On, Pilgrim
Elizabeth Lopatto
Listen to a reading of this piece by the author: Download the audio. The Harry Ransom Center, home of David Foster Wallace’s papers, is quiet and smells like air conditioning; it’s hard to miss the drop in humidity when you…
Anywhere Could Be Somewhere; Not to Miss The Great Thing
Mark Strand
Anywhere Could Be Somewhere
I might have come from the high country, or maybe the low country, I don’t recall which. I might have come from the city, but what city in what country is beyond me. I might have come from the outskirts of a city from which others have come or maybe a city from which only I have come.
…
“Stubborn as a”: Shane McCrae’s Mule
Lindsay Turner
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011. 84 pages. $15.95. A first book of poetry can feel like a new relationship; it’s fitting that many of the poems in Shane McCrae’s first collection, Mule, revolve around the conceit “we married in.”…
Grandfather’s Wake
Stephen Haynie
This story does not begin with Uncle George losing two of his fingers, though it does end with Grandmother telling us that we are all out of our minds. She will storm into the living room with a rush of…
Memory in the Wine
Hope Maxwell Snyder
After Terrance Hayes This trip. This seat. This wine. This bottle. This wine. This sleep. This empty heart. This love, quickly crawling, light floating outside the window of the plane. This silence. This glass. This trembling. That is where I…
Chiasmus
Fan Li
2011 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest Winner I call my son in Baltimore and a bird picks up. It turns out the bird is a girl. “I’m Trevor’s mother,” I announce myself, pretending I’m still proud of that. “I’m Trevor’s…
September
Anna Kovatcheva
2011 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest Runner-up They catch sight of each other at four hundred sixty-six miles per hour, or at the speed where four hundred sixty-six suddenly turns to zero in a burst of broken glass and burning…
The Boy in the Lake
Nichols Ford Malick
2011 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest Runner-up There was a boy in the lake. Men in boats were searching, dragging lines. A son and his father watched from the end of a dock in a bay connected by a rocky…
