“Downstream” accomplishes several things I find deeply pleasing. First and foremost, it allows me to spend time in the company of a character whose wit and determination I admire from the opening paragraph. Almost everyone seems to be against Clay—his parents, his grandparents, his neighbor, the local shopkeeper—but, however many slings and arrows come his…
For anyone who has been following contemporary fiction in the past few years, Laura van den Berg needs no introduction. Her debut collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, lit up the literary landscape upon its release. The praise came in bunches, culminating with being named a…
Voyager 2 traveled another 800,000 miles today. Launched on August 20, 1977, the spacecraft is still sending data to the radio telescopes of the Deep Space Network in the Mojave desert around Goldstone. Any information dispatched today—about the solar winds that Voyager is flying through—will have taken thirteen hours to travel back 8.6 billion miles…
Reprinted from Issue 18 of Ploughshares, Fall 1979.? (guest-edited by James Randall) Seamus Heaney has been at Harvard University teaching two writing courses during the Spring semester. The interview took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Michael Mazur’s studio with James Randall and Seamus Heaney seated on a couch, tape recorder between them, and Michael Mazur…
All afternoon she does battle with the keyboard, pausing only to ram her bifocals upward with an exasperated knuckle or yank out some more of her hair. Your heart is an icicle, she accuses her heroine. Your gestures—are you made of tin? she inquires of her hero, kicking his ankles for good measure. And as…
Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Julia Story with the twentieth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her prose poetry collection Post Moxie: Poems (Sarabande Books, 2010). 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…
The summer I raised orphaned songbirds in Wisconsin, the spare room in my house was scattered with plastic laundry baskets, each containing one berry box lined with tissue. Every twenty minutes, I walked from basket to basket, offering a needle-less syringe of soupy formula to the nestlings I’d placed in the berry boxes. If the…
In “At the Fishhouses,” Elizabeth Bishop writes-half-playfully-that she’s “a believer in total immersion.” In “Arrival at Santos,” she exchanges the unsatisfying port city for “driving to the interior.” This descent or expedition to the inner life of things has been one of the continuing qualities of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry-neither relinquishing the pleasures of the passing…
"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…
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