Walk alive in the woodsin the waking faint of Spring,on circling pathwaysbeside a goose-honking lake,through Sapsucker Woods’dense wetlands and forest,as a papier-mâché moon floatsover mud-dried leaves,sunglare flashes chrome off the water,gold bursts of marsh marigoldsrise from green tussocks,and hairy ropes of poison ivysnake around the barkof old dogwoods, ash, hemlocks,and one dead hornbeam,whittled by weather,…
Romania, 1983 The curette is a stylus, my mother says as she wraps it gently, the way she wraps strudel, but in white linen and tighter. The stylus, my mother says, is a typewriter. That one we keep in uncle’s house, under floorboards in the pig shack. Uncle is illiterate and a drunk so…
Some people say there are only five possible plots. A stranger comes to town, a person falls in love with a stranger, a stranger’s true identity is revealed to themselves or to others, a war is fought in a strange land, and then—full circle—a person leaves town for a strange land. There are many variations…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Kashona Notah with the twelfth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his story “Bettie Page and Jimmy Free Bird,” which appeared in the Winter 2022-23 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles. The $2,500 prize—sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron,…
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2023) Marilyn Hacker, Calligraphies (W. W. Norton, 2023) DeWitt Henry, Restless for Words: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2023) Helen Elaine Lee, Pomegranate (Atria, 2023) Gary Soto, Downtime (Gunpowder Press, 2023) Dan Wakefield, Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer (Seven Stories Press, 2022) Eleanor Wilner, Gone to…
Peter Ho Davies recommends Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Zando, 2023). “A debut novel of dark, soulful magic reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado or Silvia Moreno-Garcia (and further back, Mary Shelley). The horror of grief has rarely been so viscerally or movingly evoked.” Peter Ho Davies recommends The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen (Henry…
Gourds cover everything, even spilling onto the sidewalk, practically falling into the cobblestone street. Orange, green, white, even pink gourds, everywhere on my block. I see them, of course. I just don’t think too much about them. It’s autumn. Gourd season. Then one day, I’m sitting in my car for an hour and a half…
Right away, Raj could tell Rupa apart from the other passengers. Even though he’d encouraged his mother to send her in American travel gear, she’d arrived in a homespun sari that looked like a hand-me-down, beleaguered and wrinkled as it was from the long journey. She clasped her hands together in greeting and tried to…
1 And this will be her, a lonely woman on the threshold of the ocean. Early morning and the tall waves will break in black and white and mauve. Quickly, she will bury her dress in the sand so it won’t blow away. She will feel her body acutely aching from the night before,…
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