The youngest, my only sister, quaked in the bunk bed overhead the night the eldest brother left for college. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “The family is breaking up,” she sobbed. A murmuration of starlings floods the sky one late November sunset. Twisting in dark, iridescent waves in midair, hundreds of thousands of birds move in…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Claire Luchette with the thirty-third annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for their book, Agatha of Little Neon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction….
Peter Ho Davies recommends Dixon, Descending, by Karen Outen (Dutton, February 2024). “A gripping debut novel about the aftermath of an Everest expedition, distinguished by its searching, sympathetic portrayal of middle-aged masculinity.” Tess Gallagher recommends I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State, edited by Rena Priest (Empty Bowl, 2023). “This book is mostly…
Richard Tillinghast, Blue If Only I Could Tell You (White Pine Press, September 2022).
I threw myself into the ocean once, off a spit of land on the coast of Maine where the rocks stand up into a low outcropping, and the steady hands of the tide pull the sea away from the shore, out into the bay. As it recedes, the water surges past the shoulders of the…
“You all, who will emerge out of the flood In which we have drowned, Remember When you speak of our weaknesses Also the dark time From which you’ve escaped.” —Bertolt Brecht, “To Future Generations” Translation by Terence Renaud 1. “memento mori” The madness began in the fall of 2000, after General Ariel Sharon swaggered up…
1. “A crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in.”[1] On September 7, 2017, minutes before midnight, I was alone in a borrowed house when something began to shift: an indeterminate sensation of motion, like lapping waves. I did what I had learned to do as a child, growing up in Kuwait: I looked…
In May 2009, a year after I graduated from college, I found myself in a mangrove swamp thirty miles east of Haikou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province, Hainan Island, standing atop a massive, concrete floodgate. With me were six reporters from a Cantonese television station, the CEO of one of China’s largest telecommunications…
I lived about fifteen years in New York and Los Angeles, and by the time I moved back to rural Ohio, I’d been gone long enough to forget all the stuff I hated: I forgot about the rules for men (there are none) and the rules for women (the men make the rules). I forgot…
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