David Roderick's second book, The Americans, pledges its allegiance to dirt. And to laptops. And to swimming pools, the Kennedys, a flower in a lapel, plastic stars hanging from the ceiling of a child's room, churning locusts, a jar of blood, a gleam of sun on the wing of a plane. His poems swarm with life. They also ask an unanswerable question: What does it mean to be an American? Restless against the borders we build—between countries, between each other—Roderick roams...

The Winter 2020-21 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 Winter 2020-21 Issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles, features poetry an...

Edited by the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse in The New YorkerSeamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh ...

If you could have any animal's feet, whose would you choose?WHAT IF YOU HAD ANIMAL FEET? is the next book in the successful WHAT IF series by Sandra Markle, illustrated by Howard McWilliam, following the very popular WHAT IF YOU HAD ANIMAL TEETH? and WHAT YOU IF HAD ANIMAL HAIR? This latest edition will teach kids about the amazing variety of feet in the animal kingdom and their specialty functions! From cheetahs' fast feet to mountain goats' nimble climbing hooves, to flies' stick...

Over The Anvil We Stretch contains swampy, powerful poems that are as exciting as the pocket knife you got for your birthday, the three legged frog on the lawn and the jar of marbles your mother kept in the kitchen. Mojgani's poems are the sound of the river and the stars burning above. He manages to capture the axe in the stump with blood still on the handle. Anis Mojgani has drawn a map of the country in the shape of his wild surreal poems. These are memories of a life, captured through ...

A long-awaited yet startlingly urgent new collection from “a contemporary master”*—a fierce, big-hearted eye on our last, tumultuous decade, and our fragile environment *Los Angeles Review of BooksLinda Gregerson’s long-awaited new collection is a tour de force, a compendium of lives touched by the radical fragility of the planet and, ultimately, the endless astonishment and paradox of being human within the larger ecosystem, “in a world where every breath...

**A Pulitzer Prize FinalistWinner of the Los Angeles Time Book PrizeAn autobiographical collection of poetry by Alice Notley, "One of America's greatest poets" (Poetry Foundation)**Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through ...

A gorgeous new take on Aesop's Fables with stories from around the world masterfully illustrated by an award-winning print-maker.The world is connected, and so are our stories. In this picture book, stunningly illustrated with Holly Berry's hand-carved wood cuts, we're introduced to short versions of Aesop's Fables as they're told in various corners of the globe.The stories included are:The Heron (USA, New England marsh)The Lion and the Mouse ...

This collection drawn from more than forty years of the poet's work is "a superb introduction to newcomers and a sumptuous offering to familiars" ( Publishers Weekly).Former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall has been celebrated with numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Medal of the Arts.This volume collects some of Hall's finest short poetry written between 1947 and 1990. Here are poems of landscape and love, ...

Exploring the myriad ways in which we go about preserving what might otherwise be forfeited.Whether trained specialists or lay people who care about something, preservationists come from every stratum of life. The archivist, the linguist, the local town historian. The paleontologist, the heirloom seed-saver, the family photographer, the Monuments Men. Old two-by-two Noah and taxonomist Linnaeus. The suburban girl who collects enough yard sale books to buil...

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third "voice" emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too fam...

This groundbreaking anthology offers a broad and representative introduction to some of the most exciting, fresh voices on the contemporary poetry landscape by gathering together generous selections from the work of 85 younger American poets.The poets selected were born after 1960, published their first book within the last 10 years, and have no more than three books published. Some are the recipients of numerous awards, while others, who are making their first appearance, are quic...