Rodney Jack has mastered Dickinson’s imperative: he tells the truth and tells it slant. His poems are marked by a welcome, persuasive, Classical restraint. The poet’s sensibility, and the particulars of his autobiography, smoulder behind all his work, but his gifts for the telling detail, for a moving intimacy of tone, and for a syntax…
"Ancestors" shows the quiet virtues for which he is becoming known as a poet. It has subtle imagery (the wasp, transposed into the ghostly shapes of the ancestors; the loaves of phantom bread); it has narrative momentum without being tediously anecdotal; most of all, it is alive in its various iambic rhythms, never coercively regular…
John Casteen is extremely talented, very dedicated, and a marvelous young writer. He always had a raw and edgy talent, an energy and kinetic spirit that were very impressive. Over the course of his time with us at UVA, he smoothed and solidified that talent and energy into finishing poems that were very impressive. He…
In my opinion and in the opinions of many teachers, writers, and readers of contemporary poetry I am in touch with, Beth Woodcome, still in her mid-twenties, is one of the most talented, original, and hard-working poets in the country. —Franz Wright, author of many collections of poetry and translation, including most recently Walking to…
Dobby Gibson’s poems are remarkable for their enactment of thought. Even at their most associational, there is always a syntax of argument at work which lends his sometimes serpentine sentences forceful momentum. Even when he’s flying by the seat of his pants, there’s a splendid sense of a presiding, living intelligence. —Dean Young, author of…
What I find unusual in Alissa Valles’s poems is a very strong expression of intellectual passion invested into the historical—or strictly personal—world. Her poetry is coming close to a kind of a "dynamic wisdom" maybe best exemplified in poems like "Two Gods." I think there’s an exceptional promise in her work, in her spiritual energy….
This special Emerging Writers issue features forty poets and ten fiction writers who have yet to publish a full-length book, nominated by authors who have. When we put out a call for submissions to the issue, our hope was that writers who had already established their literary careers would be inclined to help others get…
Jay Leeming is the most brilliant of the younger poets that I have read lately. He is a high-stepper, and he risks a lot with each brief line. He is not one of those who puts down the name of his laundromat and everything that has happened to him since he was six years old….
When I first read the announcement for the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Issue I immediately thought of Ted Mathys, a poet whose talent reminds one of Hart Crane, and not just because Ted is also from Ohio and now lives in New York, but because of the preternatural facility for language they share as well as…
No products in the cart.