In nonfiction, our winner is Jung Hae Chae for her story “Pojangmacha People.” Of her essay, nonfiction judge Leslie Jamison said, “A searing lyric built of sweat and salt and sorrow, hot soup and deep shame—an ode to the elderly drunk men seeking solace in the “tiny domed cathedral” of every drinking hut along the…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Xuan Juliana Wang with the twenty-ninth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her collection, Home Remedies (Hogarth, 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 year’s judge was…
In November 1962, Stevie Smith received a letter from “an addict…a desperate Smith-addict.” The importunate admirer inquired as to how she might get hold of Smith’s elusive first novel (having just completed her own) and hoped to arrange a meeting “over tea or coffee” in London, where she was planning to move in the new…
Same one we’d kept in the garage or in the toolshed my whole life, same loose handle, same tarnished blade. I’d seen my father sharpen it on the bench grinder, sparks flying, to cut through roots or hardened soil. Same one I’d used to replant our overgrown geraniums one spring,…
Book Recommendations from Our Former Guest Editors Tess Gallagher recommends To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991–2019 by Jane Mead (Alice James Books, 2019). “This book collecting all of Jane’s work from 1991 to 2019 arrives as we look to celebrate this incomparable writer’s tough-tender true-hearted way of singularly bringing into language ways of…
Ignore that I am invisible to you, a man old enough to call a girl a girl when I see one. Ignore how I am held up by a half-Windsor slouched under teeth yellow as a work day is endless. Ignore the depth of my voice and listen. It’s not the van. Or…
Not my daughter and me saying once, and once again, to remember we need tofu. But more me saying, please call if you’re going to be really late. And then we’re way past re-, and eyerolls won’t undo it, and compulsion won’t let the mind rev any way but. There’s a moth—the greater wax moth—that…
Robert Pinsky, The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poetry at the Extremes of Feeling (W. W. Norton & Company, October 2019). Edward Hirsch, Stranger by Night (Knopf, February 2020).
There was a time when, sitting in a parking lot, I could make the parked car in front of me dematerialize. Could drive straight through it, if I wanted to. That was an unwashed time, birdcalls trapped in drawers, matching sets of months when a face could never move a face again. Dematerializing the parked…
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