Circa 1960, in an early recording with La Sonora Matancera, Cuban songstress Celia Cruz belts out a street vendor’s tongue-twister offering candy by the kilo. Los traigo de coco y piña, de limón y miel de abeja. I’ve got coconut and pineapple, lemon and bees’ honey. De piña para las niñas y los de miel…
1. It’s usually a lone figure, backlit so as to seem anonymous and therefore universal, because if we don’t know who a person is, we’re more likely to think it could be us. No one seemed to consider the animosity of strangers or the threat we might associate with the unknown. The people are poised…
Romania, 1983 The curette is a stylus, my mother says as she wraps it gently, the way she wraps strudel, but in white linen and tighter. The stylus, my mother says, is a typewriter. That one we keep in uncle’s house, under floorboards in the pig shack. Uncle is illiterate and a drunk so…
Some people say there are only five possible plots. A stranger comes to town, a person falls in love with a stranger, a stranger’s true identity is revealed to themselves or to others, a war is fought in a strange land, and then—full circle—a person leaves town for a strange land. There are many variations…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Kashona Notah with the twelfth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his story “Bettie Page and Jimmy Free Bird,” which appeared in the Winter 2022-23 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles. The $2,500 prize—sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron,…
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2023) Marilyn Hacker, Calligraphies (W. W. Norton, 2023) DeWitt Henry, Restless for Words: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2023) Helen Elaine Lee, Pomegranate (Atria, 2023) Gary Soto, Downtime (Gunpowder Press, 2023) Dan Wakefield, Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer (Seven Stories Press, 2022) Eleanor Wilner, Gone to…
Peter Ho Davies recommends Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Zando, 2023). “A debut novel of dark, soulful magic reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado or Silvia Moreno-Garcia (and further back, Mary Shelley). The horror of grief has rarely been so viscerally or movingly evoked.” Peter Ho Davies recommends The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen (Henry…
Gourds cover everything, even spilling onto the sidewalk, practically falling into the cobblestone street. Orange, green, white, even pink gourds, everywhere on my block. I see them, of course. I just don’t think too much about them. It’s autumn. Gourd season. Then one day, I’m sitting in my car for an hour and a half…
My Tante Hilde lived for over fifty years in a moshav across the road from an Israeli Arab village north of Acre. After every war, suicide bombing, and assassination, she would shake her head and say, “If it weren’t for the leaders, this wouldn’t happen!” She was talking about what she knew personally: the Arab…
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