Kenyon Review Editors' Picks

From The Kenyon Review - June 12, 2017

What are you reading this summer? Each year, the Kenyon Review staff, editors and advisory board share what books they recommend — or are looking forward to reading themselves — as summer comes to Gambier. Here are some suggestions for your summer list.

KATHERINE HEDEEN, TRANSLATIONS EDITOR

Clayton Eshleman, ed. “A Sulfur Anthology”
Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith, eds. “Hick Poetics: An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry”

Here are two collections that break down the monolithic idea of “Contemporary American Poetry.” “Hick Poetics" questions the where of it and roars: some of the US’s best writing (forty poets here) happens at the margins, in the peripheries within the metropolis. The literary magazine Sulfur (1981-2000) grabbed hold of the margins as true poetic center. The anthology collects experimentation, innovation, translation from there and here, culled from forty-six issues and over 11,000 pages. If your vision “lies within the wilds,” these anthologies are for you.