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…
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…
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…
Fifty-six years ago I picked up a musical instrument for the first time with intent to commit jazz. It was a trombone left behind by another kid at the jazz record store where we both hung out. (He’d been snatched by Selective Service for the Korean War. I’d 4-F’ed out.) I got a single lesson…
I want to send out this issue of Ploughshares in the high spirits of a Saturday morning in late March. I was alone and took a long walk by myself, but I also carried with me this surprising gathering of writers, this sudden congregation of solitaries, some from different countries, a few no longer living….
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a boy turns into a daffodil, a girl turns into a tree, a husband and wife turn into snakes and slither away together. The fisherman Glaucus, seeing the fish he’s just caught return to life after he’s spread them out on the meadow, eats one of the strange leaves they’re lying on…
"World is suddener than we fancy it," Louis MacNeice announced in his poem "Snow": "World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural . . ." So I felt, collecting the poems and stories for this issue of Ploughshares. The issue was like the great bay window in MacNeice’s poem, with…
No products in the cart.