Winter 2001-02

Description

The Winter 2001-02 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Jorie Graham. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (The Dream of the Unified Field, Never), this issue features new works from poets such as Cole Swensen, Saskia Hamilton, Max Winter, Dean Young, and Lucy Ives. In Graham’s introduction to the issue, she challenges the trend of some contemporary poetry that creates “no shared or shareable human occasion behind it,” existing rather as a “self-indulgence, a thing ‘made of words.'” Instead, she claims that poetry should create “the sensation of something that feels corporeal reaching out to find what is corporeal in me, finding the portals where that sensorial access moves up pathways to mind, and spirit.”

There is also an eclectic selection of fiction, ranging from Chelsey Johnson’s story of a young woman feeling the death of the world around her, to Michael Huffman’s description of a fatally-unorthodox Good Friday parade, to Thomas O’Malley’s characterization of a child’s mother who speaks with the dead.