We’ve lost many bright lights in recent years–writers whose work shaped literary spaces, friends, students, and readers on and off the page. Among them are three writers whose work appears in this issue: Jennifer Martelli, Michael Burkard, and Elizabeth Bernays. These writers remind us of language’s power to confront despair, challenge apathy, and craft beauty…
My beloved grandmother, who just turned 90, used to bring me a stack of books every summer and say, “Whenever I want to go somewhere, I just open a book.” This is why I love the work in this issue of Ploughshares—it opens doors into new and deep explorations of internal and external worlds. It takes…
My first job only lasted two weeks. Fourteen years old, delivering newspapers to homes in Southeast Queens. Two weeks of getting started later than I should have and missing more than a few homes altogether and I got fired by my boss. I didn’t feel too bad about it. I deserved to lose the gig….
So much in this world we can’t make better. So much in this world we can’t understand. For those reasons, literature sustains us. We need, more than ever, language that expands human perception, that opens us to the broken world. We need the compassion and outrage and tenderness and horror of language that nibbles at…
Almost weekly, I exchange drafts of poems with a friend, and we discuss them over the phone. He lives in Cambridge, and I’m in a fifteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan. My desk looks across West End Avenue to a building where men prepare to restore the facade. One leans over the railing of a steel scaffold,…
My sophomore year of college, I had a job in the cafeteria dish room: scraping food off plates, stacking trays, helping the occasional panicked freshman dig through trash for a lost retainer. At the end of fall semester, I got an unexpected call from the financial aid office. The college’s professional literary magazine was looking…
We are witnessing a war—multiple wars—whose scale and devastation are overwhelming. Every day, pictures of maimed or murdered children, carried in the arms of their grieving families, flicker on our social media timelines. Nearly every post asks the same questions: Does our suffering not matter? Who will bear witness to our loss? To lose a…
When Lou Reed departed in 2013, I stopped what I was doing and spent a few minutes listening to “Sweet Jane” and “Pale Blue Eyes.” When I heard about Prince a few years later, I turned to “1999” and “Raspberry Beret.” These private memorials were a reflex of gratitude on my part—a small protest against…
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…
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