Search Results for: mazur

New Works by Our Advisory Editors

Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes, a novel (September 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Gail Mazur, Forbidden City (April 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, Life Pig, poems (September 2016, University of Chicago Press). Alan Shapiro, That Self-forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, essays (October 2016, University of Chicago Press). Gerald Stern, Divine Nothingness, poems (May 2016, Norton)….

New Works by Our Advisory Editors

Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, poems (W. W. Norton, January 2016) Thomas Lux, To the Left of Time, poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April, 2016) Gail Mazur, Forbidden City, poems. (University of Chicago Press, March 2016) Gary Soto, You Kiss by Th’ Book, poems (Chronicle Books, Spring 2016)

rev. of Waking by Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh's new book is introduced by the title poem, his translation from Dante's "Purgatorio," in which the speaker wakes from a dream of his own destruction. The brilliant long poem which follows it, "Endings," is a ranging philosophical narrative whose speaker has received a deadly medical prognosis and wills himself to penetrate and renew…

Two Cities by Adam Zagajewski

Gail Mazur recommends Two Cities, essays by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): “Zagajewski’s a fine poet, one of the best, and this second collection of prose pieces-memoir/essays/prose poems-is the mature work of an ecstatic ironist: cosmopolitan, sweet, philosophical, and revealing. Born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945, Zagajewski is the voice of his generation, everywhere…

Open Water by Maria Flook

Gail Mazur recommends Open Water, a novel by Maria Flook (Pantheon): “Maria Flook’s people in Open Water are the product of her full-hearted embrace of an American kind of nuttiness and a zest for their strange self-induced troubles. The margin, which is their habitat, is wildly, deliciously drawn by a writer of enormous intelligence and…

rev. of Between Silences by Ha Jin

There are many reasons to praise this extraordinary book by the Chinese poet Ha Jin. Among the poets of his generation, who came of age in the crucible of the Cultural Revolution, he is, I believe, the first to publish a collection not translated, but written in American English — spare, clear, unadorned. The poet,…

Remembering Seamus Heaney

During my first weeks as managing editor for Ploughshares, Seamus Heaney’s transatlantic writing issue, 6/1, arrived from the printer, ready to be bagged and mailed to subscribers. Michael Mazur’s monotype portrait of Heaney had appeared on the cover of 5/3, accompanying an interview by issue editor Jim Randall, just as Heaney began his decades of…

Introduction

For this fortieth anniversary issue, I invited former guest editors to contribute new work of their own, to nominate and introduce an emerging writer, or to give an account of turning points in their careers. Among the twenty-five who responded, I include here fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Longtime Ploughshares readers will recognize the…