Dependably, Consistently, Refreshingly Good

With a literary magazine as excellent and dependable as The Kenyon Review, the impulse is to jump right in and revel in the talent.  And so with that. . . .

Mary Stewart Hammond's poem "Starting Over after Long Estrangement" finds two women seated "face to face" at the Caffe Grazie ("To all appearances they are having dinner") after visiting a museum "where / they wandered side by side, as they used to / years ago."  Now, in the equally cultured atmosphere of the café, they "talk lobster and coriander reduction, / the earthiness of cauliflower custard."  They talk of everything but the past, which "sits between them, a black hole, its / gravitational field waiting to suck them in."  But the threat is idle, as they sit discussing not "the baggage of the past" but rather "pumpkin polenta," "potato gnocci."  They are "getting on with their lives," and it's only toward the end of the poem that we discover their true relationship to each other and just how much baggage there must be. 

"Starting Over after Long Estrangement" (a good, literal title) captures the weight of personal history beneath surfaces.  Is the reunion a success?  The past sits there between them, not "suck[ing] them in," but at the same time only allowing for so much closeness, an "unbridgeable abyss" that is their common bond.

What a pleasure for the reader to turn the page and find Alice Hoffman waiting to be read.  Her story "The Principles of Devotion" is not easily described.  The plot, in lesser hands, would be cliché at best and mawkishly sentimental at worst.  In Hoffman's hands, it's a small work of art.

The narrator, a girl named Azurine, loves her older sister Sara, who at the outset of the story is dying.  Sara has a wish.  "I need you to take care of the one I love.  Promise you'll never leave him."  Azurine promises, presuming she means her husband Will.  But Sara is talking about her temperamental pug, Topsy.  She wants Azurine to take care of the dog.  Sara dies moments later, and, where Topsy had bitten Azurine earlier, Azurine sees two drops of blood on her arm, a kind of blood oath to keep a sister's promise.

The tricky gist of the story is that Topsy never leaves Sara's grave.  Season after season, as Azurine grows into young womanhood, Topsy lives in the cemetery, where she brings him food and water and shelter.  Topsy is the bond between Azurine and Sara, the life force that keeps Azurine coming to her sister's grave.  It is this that keeps the story from descending into a Lassie movie. Amjad Nasser's poem "The House after Her Death," translated from Arabic by Khaled Mattawa, is an elegy.  True to its title, it's not so much about a mother's death as it is about the house she has left behind.  The first line of each verse is a variation on the same thought:

"Nothing has changed after my mother's death."
"Nothing has changed in that house since my mother's death."
"After my mother's death, nothing has changed in the house."
"Nothing has changed after my mother's death:"
"Everything is still the same[.]"

Of course, death changes everything, and keeping things the same takes effort.  If it didn't, the narrator wouldn't have to keep hammering home how little difference there is.  The poem is about the house and its inhabitants, the survivors, and their attempts to maintain a sense of routine and order in their lives.  The narrator can keep on telling himself nothing has changed, but we and the poet know better because of the poem's rich detail and its pervading sense of sorrow.

In "Prank," Kathryn Ma tells the suspenseful story of a high school guidance counselor named Kang Yan Chan, a student named Anthony Gao, and an incident on senior prank day (one I won't divulge) that brings their lives together.  It's also about generations, assimilation, and the ways in which behavior can belie expectation. Additionally, the story's resolution is powerful, riveting.  

I recommend three more poems: