Back in the day, books by popular authors were published in fall/winter. Not anymore, as proved by these forthcoming titles for spring and summer. We’ve got John Sandford, Leif Enger, William Kent Krueger, Jess Lourey, Laura Childs, Kao Kalia Yang, Gretchen Anthony, Marcie Rendon and more. Time to cull that stack of 2023 books and decide whether to plunge right into the new season.

The Call—I Thought I Knew My Family

February 2012

Shizuko is sick, sick to death with this long agony. She lays still, her ninety year-old body motionless. Her wheelchair sits empty. A head pokes in, checking. Waiting for her to die? Or do they look because they care? A roommate whines in the next bed, but Shizuko should be the one requesting help. Now a stroke. Senses leave her body. Rest. The sentence complete. Sleep. Alone again, naturally.

Shizuko was assigned to hospice after spending thirteen years in Golden Cross Nursing Home. Before, she was housed at various state-run institutions, the type you’d see in movies with hundreds of forlorn bodies wandering long, dingy white hallways and rows and rows of beds. For decades, she roamed these halls ceaselessly. She outlived all her roommates.

Her family came as immigrants, picked peaches and grapes in the fields of California, found poverty and racism and yet stayed while struggling to build something. Shizuko avoided the Japanese American internment camps of World War II because she was classified as “retarded,” a derogatory term unfortunately commonly used in the past. Her life was branded with confusion.

A tiny woman, a little over four feet tall and weighing only seventy pounds, she was in constant motion, always relentlessly moving, seemingly endlessly active. Even when limited to a wheelchair, she could be left alone, content to shuffle throughout the structures, paddling the floor with her brightly colored, tiny, kid’s tennis shoes. A life of pain, illness, separation, departure, and return. Like a ghost, perpetually searching for stolen time.

A phone message from the Wildrose Funeral Home. A solicitation call? I dislike and distrust the phone—I farm, work with dirt, orchards and vineyards stretching along the horizon. I talk more to peaches than people because the trees pretend to listen. I find comfort and order in vine rows: their history I understand and accept.

Alice Waters thinks David Mas Masumoto’s peaches could change the world. Today, Masumoto shares his search for the perfect peach and the shocking family secret that changed the history of his farm. Plus, we chat with Nichole Accettola about Scandinavian baking, from cinnamon knots to rye bread, and we learn the language of strawberries.

In early January the American Academy of Poets elected Afaa M. Weaver, Diane Seuss, and Jericho Brown to its Board of Chancellors. I was thrilled by the news, because these poets are patriotic literary citizens who belong to the world and relate to it with a gentle, transcultural consciousness. I was additionally happy for Weaver because of his longtime commitment to The Hopkins Review, where I am a contributing author. Weaver, who retired from Simmons University, where he held the Alumnae Endowed Chair for twenty years, has published several collections of poetry including A Fire in the Hills (2023), Spirit Boxing (2017), City of Eternal Spring (2014), and The Government of Nature (2013), which won him the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In a career spanning five decades of active writing and publishing, Weaver has received four Pushcart prizes, as well as numerous fellowships and awards, including a 1995 fellowship from the Pennsylvania State Arts Council, a 1998 Pew Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholar appointment to Taiwan, where he taught at the National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts. In 2023, the Academy of American Poets awarded him the Wallace Stevens Award. His papers are kept in the Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, and his portrait by Rachael Eliza Griffiths is installed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Weaver is currently a member of the MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

We do not usually expect a life as troubled as Weaver’s and a history as cruel as that of the 1950s and ’60s Baltimore from which he emerged to offer calm to a future witness like me. But Weaver spoke with vision and care, taking on the paradox of American civilization with unsparing honesty. In this conversation, Weaver and I talk about the internal dialogue of his life and work. 

“A few years ago, my niece gave me a rock that says ‘you rock’ on it. I put it on my desk because I thought it was cute, but I had no idea how many times I would glance over at it for encouragement whenever I felt overwhelmed with work or was worried I wasn’t getting something right…” 

The Winter 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review includes an essay by Carrie Cogan, the winner of the 2023 Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest, selected by Leslie Jamison; work by the 2021 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellows, Allison Albino, Emily Stoddard, and Jane Walton; poetry by Sara Abou Rashed, Sarah Ghazal Ali, David Joez Villaverde, and Kim Garcia; fiction by K-Ming Chang, Melissa Yancy, and Brian Ma; nonfiction by Oz Johnson and Sarah Minor; and much more. The cover art is by DARNstudio, which consists of Ron Norsworthy and David Anthone.

Listening in Deep Space

BY DIANE THIEL

We’ve always been out looking for answers,

telling stories about ourselves,

searching for connection, choosing

to send out Stravinsky and whale song,

which, in translation, might very well be

our undoing instead of a welcome.

Diane Thiel has lived in Europe and South America and is fluent in several languages. A 2001 Fulbright Scholar and recipient of the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers awards, Thiel holds BA and MFA degrees from Brown University. She has taught creative writing, literature and other subjects at the University of Miami, Florida International University, University of New Mexico, and elsewhere. Many of the poems in Echolocations, Thiel’s first collection, speak frankly about her German heritage and the lineage of trauma brought on by war and violence. Several relate to her parents’ experience of mingling cultures and languages, or to their early lives. See More By This Poet