Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, poems (W. W. Norton, January 2016) Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time, poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April, 2016) Gail Mazur, Forbidden City, poems. (University of Chicago Press, March 2016) Gary Soto, You Kiss by Th’ Book, poems (Chronicle Books, Spring 2016)
When you reach “a certain age,” time begins to accelerate, and you become acutely aware that there’s much less time ahead than behind. And when your older friends start dying, the closer you were to them, the more their deaths seem impossible, a mistake, some stupid oversight—a fatal lapse of attention that resulted in their…
Chapter 1 “Tino, come here,” his mom called him back to her bedside. Tino was on his way out, but stopped. The nurse had been searching for something among medicine bottles on the bedside table and also looked up. “Take care of your dad,” Tino’s mom said. “I will,” he told her and kissed her…
That morning a lamb was born. They’re born a lot and I’m used to it, but still, to hear that tiny bleating from the comfort of my bed. The mother was Cindy, a Katahdin hair sheep of some distinction, one of the older gals, not a nurture natural. I had to get up at three…
I chose this life I’m inhabiting, the mousy isolation of a writer who distantly teaches, the husband and two small children and the house with its monthly measure of death called a mortgage. Still, I’m wary of accumulation; my impulse is to pare to the bone. We have seasonal fits of surrendering goods, giving away,…
At sunrise on the first Saturday in March, 1970, as the body count continued to rise in the war in Vietnam, less than two months before the Cambodian Incursion, when campus protests would close down universities across the country, including mine, I sat in a coffee shop on Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach. On the…
While it is only possible for this Ploughshares transatlantic issue to offer a snapshot of current British and Irish poetry, I have tried to make it as representative as possible. Most of the poets I’ve been able to solicit work from are included in one or other of the three most recent generational anthologies published…
I. Living It When a teacher at the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, Ireland, was asked about James Joyce, the school’s most famous student, he is said to have replied: “not one of our successes.” That wasn’t the attitude at my Jesuit high school in Detroit in the early 1970s. There, Joyce’s Jesuit…
Anna is in the orchard wearing a sleeveless housecoat, lifting a stone from the Roman road discovered a few feet away. It was unearthed a week ago during the gas line extension to Taranto. The stone fits a low wall in the garden she’s planted with nightshades—eggplant, tomatoes, firecracker red peperoncini hot peppers whose oil…
No products in the cart.