Introduction

We are witnessing a war—multiple wars—whose scale and devastation are overwhelming. Every day, pictures of maimed or murdered children, carried in the arms of their grieving families, flicker on our social media timelines. Nearly every post asks the same questions: Does our suffering not matter? Who will bear witness to our loss? To lose a child is to lose a future, and to live forever with the phantom of missing moments.

At times like these, it can seem that literature has nothing to offer. To think about books when poets are being killed, libraries bombed, or schools leveled to the ground can seem like an enormous luxury. But in reading and selecting the stories, essays, and poems for the spring issue of Ploughshares, I felt something akin to hope, because I was reminded that literature salvages what war tries to destroy.

Literature shows us that good and evil live inside all of us, that language can be more than slogans, that several seemingly contradictory ideas can be true at the same time. Literature is also, above all, a pursuit of what beauty we can find in our troubled and violent world.

When I began editing this issue, my primary goal was to find work that moved me, gave me language for what I couldn’t articulate, made me look—and look again. I hope you find as much pleasure and inspiration in reading it as I did.