When you pick up a copy of The Kenyon Review, you can tell just by the feel of it what to expect inside. The smooth, perfect-bound journal has a heft and refined-ness about it, starting with the striking and precisely-composed black-and-white cover photograph of a crowded Havana bus.
The stories are unforgettable, especially "The Witch of Truro" by Alice Hoffman, which has stayed with me for many months and which still moves me whenever I reread it.
Poetry in this issue ranges from long and lyrical -- such as "Telling the Gospel Truth" by Beth Ann Fennelly -- to the tersely potent "Complaint in the Garden" by Randall Man, from his book of the same name which won the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry:
I blame English seed, the radishes
that came to no proof,
that will never thrive.
I blame a kind of Melontha,
the worms I never saw,
the toads, snakes, and creeping,
hurtful beasts I never saw.
With a mixture of well-known and emerging writers, this issue of The Kenyon Review is well worth the purchase price.
Back issues, along with excerpts from each issue, are available through the journal's web site at www.kenyonreview.org.
