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image of a tall stone statue next to a small path in a park at autumn--the surrounding trees are bright orange, covered in autumn foliage

Joanne Randall: Remembrance and a Poem

Joanne Randall, a longtime friend of Ploughshares, passed away this February at 81 in Kansas City. Along with her husband, Emerson professor Jim Randall, Joanne was a full partner in Pym Randall Press, and helped create a community that includes many of Ploughshares‘ early contributors and guest editors. As Ploughshares founder DeWitt Henry writes, “For…

Wonderful Investigations

Wonderful Investigations Dan Beachy-Quick Milkweed Editions, April 2012 212 pages $20 Reading essays by poets is just plain fun. Take Dan Beachy-Quick. Author of five collections of poetry and now a second essay collection, Wonderful Investigations, he writes sentences like, “We must build a wall to find out that we are a circumference always expanding,…

Momentum

I’ve heard of a mythical thing that some writers get to experience: momentum. Like a heavy stone, a writing career starts out motionless and seemingly without hope of ever moving, but then it starts to roll, and, sometimes, builds speed. Momentum can happen to “good writers,” or so I’ve been told. Up until recently, I…

Blurbese: “funny”

Book reviewers’ relationship with the word “funny” is, well—a little funny. I’m somewhat sympathetic about this one, too, at least when it comes to novels that are deliberately comic, because it’s tough to review authors whose reputation is based entirely on humor. What, after all, can the word “funny” really say about a book by…

Those Who Can, Teach

It’s a question every newly minted, card-carrying poet/fiction writer faces after graduating from an MFA program: should I go and teach creative writing to pay the bills and make connections while I finish my Great American Poetry Collection/Novel? Or should I get as far away from academia as possible? I was lucky to get and…