Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
Natsuko Imamura’s 2019 novel reads at first glance as a fairly straightforward psychological thriller, with voyeurism is at its center. Imamura, however, also explores a deeper psychological entanglement, stemming from a desire to connect when social interaction feels like an insurmountable barrier.
Monica A. Hand’s 2012 poetry collection is a polyphonic celebration of the multidimensionality of the self. The musician Nina Simone’s echoing impact and the poet’s own life as an artist and Black woman operate as countermelodies, playing across many emotional registers.
A. R. Ammons’s 1993 book-length poem, a meditation on excess and waste as the defining trait of our species, anticipated the worst conversations one wishes were avoidable: climate change and a non-hyperbolic global destruction.
Far from being un-American, Trump’s deployment of the “illusory truth effect” is supremely so. Indeed, it is in lock step with the shady rhetorical strategies employed by Trump’s Puritan forbearer John Winthrop. Like Trump, Winthrop’s hustle depended upon his followers seeing what they actually couldn’t, and unseeing what was right in front of them.
Craig Morgan Teicher’s newest collection is preoccupied with the anxiety of being understood, and the way that desperation pulses underneath what is explicitly spoken.
There is a key part of A Small Place in which Kincaid writes about how people like her, who come from colonized homes, struggle with their past. “Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget?” she asks.
In Bryan Washington’s first novel, photos are used, in part, to consider how we use images to communicate. They also work together to create a narrative arc that echoes the arc of the book itself.
Given its fragmented structure, intertextuality, quotations from and reflections on correspondences, and inclusion of the narrative of a pregnancy, Kate Zambreno’s newest book feels like a “library of the mind,” encompassing texts on reading, writing, authorship, friendship, betrayal, the body, birth, and death.
Catherine Raven’s friendship with a fox that wanders onto her property highlights the challenges she’s struggled with for years—an urge to isolate in a world that celebrates civilization, a belief in magic in a world of scientific inquiry, and a strong intuition that what is most common isn’t necessarily what is most natural.
No products in the cart.