The first time I met Tom Sleigh, he was stealing my suitcase. I had just gotten off a charter bus in Mérida, Mexico, where I’d be spending a week at a conference, and in the rush and shove of passengers, I lost sight of my black roller among the pile into which the driver was…
Often, when I’m writing, I open up my Internet browser onto poems I’ve found to be particularly instructive or compellingly enigmatic, poems that connect me with the reasons and, indeed, the questions about why I write and return to poetry as a reader, a parishioner, a believer. I’ve collected these poems via links I’ve emailed…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Ramona Ausubel with the fifth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story “Fresh Water from the Sea,” which appeared in the Summer 2015 issue, guest-edited by Lauren Groff. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best piece of fiction…
Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, poems (W. W. Norton, January 2016) Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time, poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April, 2016) Gail Mazur, Forbidden City, poems. (University of Chicago Press, March 2016) Gary Soto, You Kiss by Th’ Book, poems (Chronicle Books, Spring 2016)
Peter Ho Davies recommends Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert: “A rust belt epic by a writer of distinctive vision. More than a dozen years in the making—I saw the earliest iterations in workshop and have never forgotten them—it’s been worth the wait.” Jane Hirshfield recommends Practicing the Truth, by Ellery Akers: “Practicing the Truth…
I wonder what Tomaz is doing in the afterlife. It’s not totally dark yet here but my shadow is getting pretty confident. There wasn’t a window here before but there is now. I know I’m nothing but a drop of water but not if I’m rain or dew or a tear from a stone eye….
after Rilke His vision, from the constant cascade of chicken wire, has grown So benumbed it containsNothing else, save for his lastness, though he doesn’t know this. Yet he knows, in the mannerThat beasts can know, that his name is Benjamin, & the name Comes with meat scraps, slotted Through the…
Those of you who’ve gone before how precious you remain how little your essential nature has altered and insofar as it has I can’t grasp how you might be other than you ever were surely you aren’t wholly “gone” though that’s undeniably your essence now to have gone surely you haven’t even metaphorically risen or…
from Thresholds Eating a sandwich at the desk at the window tracing the oak’s bare winter branching the thick lacing network is more an illusion unhindered by the system’s like extensions no constraint to the path each finds in the air. Gray fissured bark makes home for the lichen…
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