When my parents died, I inherited all of their photographs and papers as they had inherited their parents’ photographs and papers and so on back a few generations. Things came to me chaotically: in old shoe boxes and albums and scrapbooks, in envelopes and baskets and shopping bags, in emptied kitchen drawers. This summer, I’ve…
Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it. — Home, Marilynne Robinson 2. Genesis: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 3. My father is…
Campbell McGrath, Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems (Ecco Press, 2019)
Tess Gallagher recommends Poems of Repossession: Leabhar na hAthghabhála edited by Louis De Paor, Irish-English Bilingual Edition (Bloodaxe Books, 2016). “This book of Irish poems in translation carries some very strong poems, [including] one by Seán Ó Ríordáin called ‘Switch,’ which is the central mandate for empathy—a poet’s main tool. Also, one may read what…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Belle Boggs with the first annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “In the Shadow of Man,” which appeared in the Summer 2018 issue, guest-edited by Jill McCorkle. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a…
Here is the sequence of events from my perspective. I stopped at the stop light, in the right lane. It was early enough in the morning that I did not quite have my wits about me. But that doesn’t matter. I saw a group of five white women, all dressed alike, in tight-fitting black shorts…
A self consists primarily of unremembered events. The highest number of memories forgotten about a particular person will disappear from the mind of that same person. Usually this happens involuntarily, but some people suppress certain memories. Occurrences tangential to the person tend to retain even less staying power. Many of the moments relating to the…
A plane crashed under mysterious circumstances in a country with a dense and sparsely populated rainforest. None of the passengers or crew survived. Because of the nature of the accident, many parts of the plane had scattered over a wide area, which made what would prove a difficult investigation almost impossible. People from nearby villages…
My high-school English teacher Ms. Dachs did three things I remember my senior year: she cried openly in front of the class on September 12, 2001; she introduced us to William Safire’s column “On Language”; and she played a cassette tape of George Carlin’s stand-up bit on euphemisms. That’s all I have of her. (What…
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