At the beginning of the third book of the Odyssey, Telemachus’ ship pulls into the harbor of sandy Pylos, as the morning light burnishes the sea. Homer tells us: The sun rose from the still, beautiful water Into the bronze sky, to shine upon the gods And upon men who die on the life-giving earth….
What a reprieve from all this stultifying heat. And all the threats implicit in that heat: the sweep and snare of blackberry, razor barb of concertina wire. The bluish teasel nearly chafed you with its bracts. You’ve made it through some muck with your absolute body still intact. So far, the Camp Far West lake…
The Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Ploughshares is pleased to present Angela Pneuman with the first annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story, “Occupational Hazard,” which appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Colm Tóibín. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman,…
Last summer, with a serial rapist roaming Ann Arbor, I asked my undergraduates to read an essay called “In the Combat Zone” by Leslie Marmon Silko, in which she argues that if women felt comfortable using firearms, they wouldn’t present such passive victims for men intent on harming them. One of my female students, fair…
My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place. My brothers are notorious. They do regular things, like wait. On my birthday they say my name. They will never forget my name. What is that knowledge? Is it…
When you visit the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amidst overgrown greenery, almost sequestered in the bushes across from the Sorbonne, as if preferring, in bronze, the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, when I came upon him, the shoe emerges first,…
She had just won a major literary prize. She was slim, blond, and preposterously attractive. I was slim, blond, and preposterously awkward. Somehow I’d gotten into her poetry writing class as a first-semester freshman. I’d submitted a sonnet about a monk so consumed with sexual longing that he couldn’t pray. The monk was me, and…
for the Wu Tang Clan and 1992 Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter. Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows. Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood. Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water, give…
By the end of her thirties, Patricia Hampl had published two poetry collections and a critically acclaimed memoir. When a radio interviewer asked her what was next, she replied airily, “I have it in mind to work on fiction from now on.” What happened in the following years just goes to show that writers are…
No products in the cart.