The just-released summer 2013 issue of The Georgia Review features one of the longest individual works in the journal’s 67-year history, Judith Kitchen’s essay “The Circus Train.”
A complex yet easy-reading set of meditations on memory, mortality and history, the essay occupies a full third of the issue; however, Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review, said most readers will finish the piece wishing it didn’t have to end.
Kitchen, a regular contributor of reviews and essays to the journal for more than 20 years, notes early on in “The Circus Train” the double nature of memory: “Odd how the body seems to carry the years on its back. Piled up, one upon another, an increasing heaviness. Yet some people carry theirs lightly. Maybe they are the ones who are good at forgetting. Each day comes new, like fresh-ground pepper perking up the palate. They go out into it open to whatever it brings. But I am burdened with memory, its unerring sense of itself, so the new days must be measured against the old.”
