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I got a chance to sit down with Kim Addonizio and talk about poetry, the blues, and her new rock and roll band Nonstop Beautiful Ladies.   PK: The relationship between poetry and music has long been a contentious one.  Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading argued that “poetry begins to atrophy when it gets…

It’s time for week seven of our Free Ploughshares Summer Contest! This week we’re offering our Spring 1999 issue, guest edited by Mark Doty and featuring poems and stories from writers such as Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Tony Hoagland, and many more. In order to win, simply comment below as to why you love Mark…

Dhaka Dust Dilruba Ahmed Graywolf Press, June 2011 88 pages $15.00 “Can’t occupy the same space at the same time,” begins the title poem of Dhaka Dust, Dilruba Ahmed’s impressive debut collection. And yet Ahmed’s work, situated across the Midwestern United States, Bangladesh, and Europe, often occupies more than one space at the same time;…

I started writing “Occupational Hazard” eight  years ago, out at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. I had a bedroom/studio in an old house, former officer’s quarters, and I found myself sleepy all the time. It was so quiet, there—a break from my Tenderloin apartment in the city—and it was much easier to take…

True confession:  I’m not a rabid fan of poetry readings. On one level this is, of course, fairly rampant hypocrisy, considering that I give readings and hope to give many more (and, someday, to be paid for some of them, but let’s not talk crazy.)  But on another level it speaks to some qualities of…

The Chronology of Water Lidia Yuknavitch Hawthorne Books, April 2011 268 pages $15.95 “Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight,” writes Lidia Yuknavitch in The Chronology of Water. “They swell and dive in and out in great sinkholes in the brain.” The loss of her daughter, stillborn, is precisely that kind of tragedy, and launches…

We’ve really enjoyed all of the great comments we’ve been receiving through this contest, and this week we’re excited to offer yet another fantastic back issue of Ploughshares to a lucky winner. It’s the all-poetry Spring 1984 issue guest edited by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, and featuring work by Marilyn Hacker, Rita Dove,…

I am ready to launch my website. This is not something I’ve undertaken without long consideration.  After all, what does a website have to do with my writing?  Launching a website isn’t likely to lead me to write more poems – in fact, I spent hours trying to design it when I might have been…

The Gambler’s Nephew Jack Matthews Etruscan Press, May 2011 240 pages $15.95 Jack Matthews’ first novel, Hanger Stout, Awake!, was published in 1967, and his latest, The Gambler’s Nephew, is already the 23rd in his half-century career. Thankfully it’s never too late to discover a writer this pleasant to read. Like many of Matthews’ other…