Nonfiction

Introduction

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,…

Introduction

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…

Solo cover: a kitchen counter with pasta, a rolling pin, eggs, snails, basil, and tomatoes

Twice Eggs (Solo 2.9)

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…

A solo cover of a woman's drawn profile in orange on a cream and orange background

Portrait (Solo 2.7)

In memory of Chinua Achebe 1930-2013 Aupres de toi j’ai retrouvé mon nom. —David Diop I. The first time I read The Portrait of a Lady I was twenty-three and had been married for less than a year. We had been living for only a few months in Nigeria, a country that had become independent…

A solo cover of two people walking on cobblestones with their shadows behind them

A Warm Breath (Solo 1.9)

In the months after my friend R.’s death, I suffered bouts of shame deeper than any I’d experienced before. These were often followed by unreasonable fits of anger, which had me shaking my fist at drivers when I was walking and shouting at pedestrians when I was driving. At least I considered them unreasonable at…