This was the summer of kitchen stove burners full of tin foil,my family’s women circling esfand smoke around the house. Our neighbor Mike was still a decade away from raping a woman.I still knew nothing of the pocketed jewelry, the body left for dead. I still rode bikes to the candy mansion with the neighborhood…
Olivia curtailed her sleeping hours to fix what’s wrong some weeks before her trip. Okay, she admits on the page, it’s been a one-month slog with VISA through salons. Last night, anonymous friend and she, in lace, race to a corner where someone shouts out a window, “Congratulations.” They call back, “We’re married but…
Coyote howls outside the patio door. 3 a.m. and someone’s out of bed turning on lights, checking windows and rain starting to sound against the skylights. When we stirred the creature vanished. Isn’t that the way even here at the cusp of the arroyo? Just as when the lizard with its stumpy tail…
First a warm blanket and a voice called Joy. Then oxygen, a faint smell, and a finger monitor. A stick at the wrist and pressure, a clear-coil tube. Then a voice called Tan and something pumped. And a thick paper packet like a vest with an eye hole. Then nothing but every-colored wallpaper…
I have long admired the immediacy and spontaneity that merges with a distancing tone of voice in the poetry of Hilda Raz—that ability she has to tell something of the everyday and make it tough, to move through the discursive to imagistic lyric all in one poem, and especially across books. It’s that “I’m as…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Jamil Jan Kochai with the thirty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction. This…
Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao (W. W. Norton, February 2022) Lloyd Schwartz, Who’s on First?: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Jane Hirshfield recommends Complete Poems by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon, 2021). “Jim Harrison’s poems have a vitality, range, and revelation equal in importance to the more widely known fiction. A pitch-perfect field guide, Harrison scouts with full sense of kinship and acrobatic powers of both language and imagination his life’s landscapes, events, and fellow creatures….
In nonfiction, our winner is Madeline Vosch, for her essay “Undead.” This essay, nonfiction judge Paul Lisicky says, “is as much about the mystery of the life force as it is about the crisis of our time and how we fail the suffering. Every note is on pitch; there’s no excess, no unnecessary embellishment, and…
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