I love poets who bring us to our proper size. Think about taking a picture of a mile-high waterfall, and about that little human figure you need in the shot to suggest the magnitude caught in the image—the tiny person is the scale factor. It isn’t that true scale diminishes the human, but rather that…
"Here’s why I write. Because Poetry begins there where death had not the final word." —Odysseus Elytis I sent out a call to some poets: friends, acquaintances, and some only known to me by their poems. Inevitably I forgot some, and also I am ignorant of many; forgive me. I asked for submissions…
Running throughout this issue, though not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry,…
Chi Chi inhaled the screen from her crack pipe.” I laugh and wait for Leslie to join in, but there is only silence on the other end of the line. “You’re serious?” I ask. “You better believe I’m serious. That child gone and almost killed herself.” I want to apologize for laughing, thinking this was…
As I was writing this introduction, a series of fierce storms began hitting sections of south central Iowa. Several weeks ago, an Iowa town named Parkersburg was completely destroyed, and the media focused on the efforts of the townspeople to contain the disaster. The storms persisted throughout most of Iowa, with extreme winds and torrential…
1. I knocked on the picture window of the Marlin Cafe, trying to get the bartender’s attention, so I could get in and have a Sunday morning hangover drink. The Marlin was an old man’s dive on Broadway near Cathedral Parkway, a street that everyone in the neighborhood called 110th Street. Technically, the bar was…
Twenty years old, sparkly makeup on my eyes and cheeks, I wrap a leg over the back of my uncle’s motorcycle, hoist myself onto the cracked vinyl seat. He’s the cool uncle. The uncle who’s fifteen years older than me, who dates a model, who sips tequila from wide-mouthed glasses in Chelsea bars. Who gives…
She’s already fallen twice, first breaking the left hip when she misses a step at the beauty parlor, then her right in a tumble at her old house in Arizona. It’s in this precarious condition that my mother comes back into my life. When her second husband dies, it falls on me, as her only…
Looking back at the table of contents of an earlier issue of Ploughshares that I guest-edited some twenty years ago, I was surprised by how few of the writers were then discoveries for me. Two certainly were. Their poems had almost nothing in common: her three poems were straightforward & hard-edged; the details came out…
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