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Dana Levin, Zacharis Award

zacharis award Ploughshares is pleased to present Dana Levin with the tenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her collection of poems, In the Surgical Theatre (APR). 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…

Poem

for Hilary In the lit room, an inkblot runs on a napkin like antlers into a three-quarter moon. Beginning to speak, I. . . gesture toward the ceiling, push my hair back behind my ear, wait— hearing a flower, red, blown by wind as on a prairie, in summer.

Contributors’ Notes

MASTHEAD Guest Editor Sherman Alexie Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Assistant Fiction Editor: Nicole Hein Kelley. Editorial Assistants: Thomas Fabian and Coppelia Liebenthal. Poetry Readers: Sean Singer, Christopher Hennessy, Tracy Gavel,…

Untitled

Rooms I (I will not say worked in) once heard in. Words my mouth heard, then — be with me. Rooms, you open onto one another in the mind: still house this life, be in me when I leave, don't take from me what took so long.

Prose Song

Somebody medieval—the celebrated Anonymous of Bologna maybe—said that implicit in such an equation as 5=5 is the equality or equivalence (I for one get those two well mixed up) of all things fivefold, such that cinquefoil or quinquereme, let us say, can stand equally for a hand or a classic hand of stud or draw…