When Barbara Perez moved from San Antonio to Boston—a city she’d never visited—to join a new program’s first MFA class, she revealed a certain willingness to take risks. Her work radiates the same willingness, using logic twined with metaphor to explore passion’s depths. In poems like “Bottle,” mindfulness is the natural way to express feeling…
A psychological experiment was once performed on horses. Each animal had been taught to stamp a hoof four times, say, when the trainer called out that number. The horses that got the number right were rewarded with a carrot or cube of sugar. But for experiment’s sake, the trainers periodically denied the horses their rewards…
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…
I’m proud to nominate Patrick Michael Finn, one of my most accomplished, prolific former students and one of my favorite writers. Mr. Finn remains someone I talk about quite often, though he graduated in 1997, and someone whose stories have never left my mind. I still remember his characters—lonely Joliet teenagers struggling with religion and…
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