DeWitt Henry recommends Contributions to Literature: A Tribute to Small Press Books by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2021). “Jack Smith—literary editor, novelist, critic, and philosophy teacher—recommends a league of his own, one in which I am proud to be included. Much as there was no ‘great tradition’ before the critic F. R. Leavis invented one, so here Smith…
Time doesn’t move, we move, says Tolstoy, but I am standing still in a trolley as it moves through a provincial city in the USSR—a country that no longer exists—in which two old ladies, who look just like my deceased mother, are speaking a strange mash-up of Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian (and another language I cannot…
Paragraph means “to write beside.” I sit beside myself, writing. I sit beside my brother’s lungs, listening to the hissing oxygen tank he also sits beside, transcribing his story of breath: scraping, wet, sticky, low. I write beside his slow strangling, struggling to inhale even when he is sitting still. Even when he runs out…
I have long admired the immediacy and spontaneity that merges with a distancing tone of voice in the poetry of Hilda Raz—that ability she has to tell something of the everyday and make it tough, to move through the discursive to imagistic lyric all in one poem, and especially across books. It’s that “I’m as…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Jamil Jan Kochai with the thirty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019). 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. This…
Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao (W. W. Norton, February 2022) Lloyd Schwartz, Who’s on First?: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Jane Hirshfield recommends Complete Poems by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon, 2021). “Jim Harrison’s poems have a vitality, range, and revelation equal in importance to the more widely known fiction. A pitch-perfect field guide, Harrison scouts with full sense of kinship and acrobatic powers of both language and imagination his life’s landscapes, events, and fellow creatures….
In nonfiction, our winner is Madeline Vosch, for her essay “Undead.” This essay, nonfiction judge Paul Lisicky says, “is as much about the mystery of the life force as it is about the crisis of our time and how we fail the suffering. Every note is on pitch; there’s no excess, no unnecessary embellishment, and…
A good barbershop tells you who owns it, and that’s so with Blue Spark in Baltimore. Bill’s place is plastered with stickers advertising tattoo parlors and breweries and garage bands and the city itself: BALT superimposed over a rat. Skulls are popular, as are likenesses of Edgar Allan Poe. Bill calls Poe the city’s first…
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