The museum is nearly empty the day we visit the Mitchell retrospective. We can wander, painting to painting. He removes his blue-framed glasses, leaning close. The modernists, he says, painted for the home, not galleries. We should be viewing these pictures seated in wingbacks. At ninety, he is my oldest friend. At ninety, he’s lost…
evening’s glance of ice glass begets glass —the anniad i pray about myself to myself and because of that i listen—i imagine another body where there is none—i can touch, from here, an icicle, though i’d never—there are small infinities and large infinities, and what is unreachable is sometimes perfectly within reach—that is the…
Translation by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang I woke this morning to find my house surrounded by two things: the turtledove and the willow. When I write, there is the sculpted turtledove, the spoken willow. When I drink tea, the replete turtledove, the hollowed-out willow. When I cannot get to sleep,…
“Is there a poetry of peace?” asked the poet Denise Levertov in her 1989 essay, “Poetry and Peace: Some Broader Dimensions,” only to answer in that very essay: “No.” After all, how can there be a poetry of something that was never deeply experienced, never deeply felt? She claimed that, like a poem, peace cannot…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Lara Egger with the thirty-second annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares…
Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022) Dan Wakefield, Kurt Vonnegut, The Making of a Writer (Seven Stories Press, 2022) Madison Smartt Bell, The Witch of Matongé (Concord Free Press, 2022)
Peter Ho Davies recommends A Down Home Meal for these Difficult Times, by Meron Hadero (Restless Books, 2022). “A brilliant debut collection of stories of the Ethiopian diaspora, by a writer whose work has appeared in Ploughshares and Best American Short Stories.” Peter Ho Davies recommends Tale of the Dreamer’s Son, by Preeta Samarasan (World…
That Sunday morning, long ago, a golden light trickled in through the window of my basement apartment and stung my boyfriend and me. It stung our eyes and stung our hearts to see our predicament sharply outlined: It was late October in Reykjavik and the sun had come to say goodbye. We’d be left in…
It’s a small mark, quick cut, a single stroke. An incident, not the main event, on the page—more flicked than drawn, starting at the top and moving, diagonally, down to the left. A diacritic. It’s a diacritic. I don’t want to use the word accent. (That question, which plagues me in the francophone world: D’où…
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