For this fortieth anniversary issue, I invited former guest editors to contribute new work of their own, to nominate and introduce an emerging writer, or to give an account of turning points in their careers. Among the twenty-five who responded, I include here fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Longtime Ploughshares readers will recognize the…
There are thirteen ways to look at a blackbird, but my backyard is not a blackbird, and I am not Wallace Stevens, but I make do with an air conditioning unit and the remnants of an entertainment center, the cherry wood stain fading into sod. I look down at this plot of land like I…
It’s the day after Christmas a flat gray morning where the rain has fallen on the crooked streets and no one has stolen our newspaper, its headline denouncing the young Nigerian, someone’s devout beloved son who tried to blow up a plane, my own son half asleep on the couch in his Levis and unraveled…
DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, grew up in an affluent suburban neighborhood of Philadelphia, with three older siblings—two brothers and one sister. His father, the owner of a candy factory, was a recovering alcoholic, a brooding, self-absorbed, volatile man. His mother was a self-sacrificing, long-suffering homemaker with artistic interests. Much of Henry’s writing has…
I always sat in the back of Mr. Kim’s algebra class. He was very enthusiastic about algebra. I drew a picture of me sticking my dick into Rex’s blond dreamgirl. Rex was on the other side of the room. I folded the paper and wrote Rex on the top, and told this ugly girl, Andrea…
The night is tall and strewn with rocks cutting my feet as I climb, panting under the blankets, the quilt. Will it ever be light again? I hear sounds outside, footsteps that I hope are a deer’s cloven hooves. Coywolves in the marsh shriek like banshees over a kill. What, I think, is a banshee,…
Sure, there was the giant knife, and the quick, fat slice of cake in his right hand, but what always surprised me was the night into which he stole. Hard and purring. Luminous and thick. It seemed not a real place— pines and bluffs and crashing waves as if it were a symptom of his…
From Years Ago, a memoir Tory Fukada showed me how to crank the corners and I practiced, abandoning the graceful strokes of cursive she’d also taught for the bold design, which seemed meant to be carved but smoldered like a brand. Dozens whirled like pinwheels on the barbed-wire page. I loved the prickly maze, the…
“If god is everywhere then he is also in this bottle.” —Ben Vautier How unlucky that god would lie low for so long in a fluxus gallery in St. Louis. Maybe not. Maybe we’ve overlooked holy rubbish everywhere, sacred cans and cartons in trash cans worldwide all being pecked at and treasured by animals who…
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