Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
I am a good confidante, and I’ll tell you the secret: never offer advice, merely listen. You may repeat, ratify, sympathize, query, even divulge a tidbit or two, whip up the objective correlative, but you must never give an opinion about what your friend should do next. Never, never, never. The summer of my separation…
MASTHEAD Guest Editor Thomas Lux Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Assistant Editor Gregg Rosenblum Associate Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Associate Poetry Editor Susan Conley Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Kris Fikkan, Eson Kim, Michelle Campo, and Jean Hopkinson. Staff Assistant: Tom Herd. Poetry Readers: Brian Scales, Jennifer Thurber,…
—a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, Canto XVII Remember, reader, if ever high in the mountains the fog caught you, so you could see only as moles do, looking through their skin how when the humid, dense vapors begin to grow thinner the sphere of the sun finds its way feebly…
for Reynolds Price This morning in my bathroom mirror, I glimpsed the slope of my shoulders, my chest thinning to a hint of ribs, the hair of my pouching belly black and beaded with water, and pondering myself limp and priestly, laced with blue veins, I judged nothing threatening. Sometimes, I admit, I even…
There is a Zen saying, “Not knowing, we proceed.” At some level this is true for us all. For Jane Hirshfield, such moving forward through enigma can be terrifying, but is also “the richest place to be.” Having recently published a book of essays and a book of poems, she is now beginning a new…
More than a few people have assumed that Howard Norman is a Canadian writer. It’s no wonder, considering that most of his work — including his first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award — is set in Canada. In fact, Norman was…
MASTHEAD Guest Editors Howard Norman & Jane Shore Editor Don Lee Poetry Editor David Daniel Associate Editor Susan Conley Assistant Fiction Editor Maryanne O'Hara Founding Editor DeWitt Henry Founding Publisher Peter O'Malley Editorial Assistants: Darla Bruno, Gregg Rosenblum, and Tom Herd. Poetry Readers: Paul Berg, Brian Scales, Michael Henry, Renee Rooks, Charlotte Pence, R. J….
I n the future, everyone will be someone else. At her school, the future had been discussed as if it were a definite sort of business, with tangible boundaries like an island nation. It was a place you could rocket to or grope towards in a state of anticipation. But if thinking about your actual…
I was born on the grounds of the Mount Mohonk Hospital for the Insane, where my father was Chief of Psychiatry, and because of this I grew accustomed to the sounds of misery before I went to sleep at night. I would lie in bed upstairs in my family’s house, which was situated one hundred…
No products in the cart.