The Spring 2025 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”The Spring 2025 Issue, edited by Peggy Schumaker, features poetry and prose by Naomi Shihab Nye, Felicia Zamora, Tim Seibl...

From her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, Cleopatra Mathis has given us poems that somehow manage to be elegant and visceral at once. What has changed in the progression of the six collections since then—in poetry addressing marriage, the mystery of animals, the delicate and indelible bonds of family, illness, and mortality—is that the visceral quotient has steadily increased, though the elegance remains undiminished. For Mathis, the natural world no longer...

Influenced by survival lessons from the natural world, Cleopatra Mathis’ Book of Dog traces a harrowing personal journey from hard endings-a divorce, the death of a beloved dog-to the fierce arrival of acceptance and change. All manner of life thrives in these pagesplovers, foxes, the companionable beetle on the bedpost, and the coyotes just beyond her back door. This poet’s discerning eye, focused on the stringent truth of what she sees around her, aims outward and refuses the s...

"A truly moving book." —John AshberyJana Prikryl’s The After Party journeys across borders and eras, from cold war Central Europe to present-day New York City,from ancient Rome to New World suburbs, constantly testing the lingua francas we negotiate to know ourselves. These poems disclose the tensions in our inherited identities and showcase Prikryl’s ambitiousexperimentation with style.“Thirty Thousand Islands,” the second half of the collection,presents some fort...

The award-winning author of The Yellow Birds returns with an extraordinary debut poetry collection.National Book Award finalist, Iraq war veteran, novelist and poet Kevin Powers creates a deeply affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listeni...

May Sarton's poetic celebrations of the American landscapeWritten in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May Sarton's third collection of poems takes inspiration from the land, the light, and the palette of the American Southwest. With archaeological precision, Sarton uncovers American history and heredity. "Plain grandeur escapes definition," begins one poem. But Sarton's America is alive with history and is continually redefined by its own settings and mythology.

The strongest collection yet from this widely praised poet is about the central players in our lives, our relationships over time—between mother and son, mother and daughter—and how one generation of relationships informs and shapes the next.The opening sequence, “Manhood,” looks at the insular world of baseball, shedding light on the complexities of gender, boyhood, and coming-of-age. The poet captures the electrifying, proud language of baseball talk, channeling the tone and appr...

D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island explores tragedy both grand and intimate, in city and country, in our own troubled moment and across the greater scope of geological time. Arranged in three “suites” of lucid, often heart-wrenching verse, the book begins with a city under siege, in a group of poems that becomes a subtle homage to New York after 9/11–a metaphorical “burnt island,” where diggers doze on their shovels, citizens contribute bottles of water, M&M’s, and casseroles to recovery ef...

From the acclaimed poet of In the Salt Marsh comes a dazzling collection about the magic hiding in the ordinary days of our past and present. Willard turns a keen eye on the natural world that witnesses these revelations, and the myriad, often surprising ways in which it intersects with our own human lot.Willard shows us time and again that “In me nothing of childhood is lost.” She recaptures for us not only the fleeting, distant shreds of a charmed, innocent youth, but br...

'Leaf'... " for anyone who likes melancholy, deep, #ThoughtProvoking #poetry." - ReviewerLyrical, often metaphorical and always unashamedly honest, these poems are expressions of the poet’s own experiences and observations about life and human nature."...filled with love, loss, betrayal, sadness, and ultimately, rebirth." - Reviewer

Finalist, 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, edited by Billy Collins“A poet of great heart and brave directness.”—Billy CollinsIn Protection Spell Jennifer Givhan explores the guilt, sadness, and freedom of relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on for no reason other than love, the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life and to each other despite the pain (or perhaps because of it). These poe...

ZARFan oddly specific collection of poems for a tiny niche audienceA zarf (plural: zarfs, zuruuf, zarves) is a holder, usually of ornamental metal, for a coffee cup without a handle… Also, the cardboard ones you wrap around your Americano-to-go because we don't want you to burn your fingers….