A collection of intensely personal lyrical essays about mortality, living well, art, and love.Mortality, With Friends is a collection of lyrical essays from Fleda Brown, a writer and caretaker, of her father and sometimes her husband, who lives with the nagging uneasiness that her cancer could return. Memoir in feel, the book muses on the nature of art, of sculpture, of the loss of bees and trees, the end of marriages, and among other things, the loss of h...

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...

The Woods Are On Fire is Fleda Brown’s deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of her life and world. Her account includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious illnesses. Visually and emotionally rich, Brown’s poems call on Einstein, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Law and Order, Elvis, and Beethoven. They stand before the ...

A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and apocalypse.Golda Meir once said, “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there’s nothing you can do.” The poems in Fleda Brown’s brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a child’s terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and en...

No Need of Sympathy is an exceptionally wide-ranging poetry collection, touching on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and the natures of poetry and reality. These poems, the eighth collection by Fleda Brown, ask huge questions; they zero in like a microscope on what’s here, at hand. They are spoken with humility, great humor, curiosity, and a deep love of living.

Booth's eighth poetry collection, with its evocations of compassion, tenderness and invading darkness, implies that redemption will come only from having loved well and wisely. Publishers Weekly remarked, "Booth is a traveler keenly, almost mystically, aware that 'how you get there is where you'll arrive.' "

“No practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass.”—Atlantic MonthlyThe National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials, Robert Hass is one of the most revered of all living poets. With The Apple Trees at Olema, the former Poet Laureate and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize offers twenty new and selected poems grounded in the beauty of the physical world. As with all of the collections of this great artist’s work, published far too infrequently, The Apple Trees ...

"In Young's work, the big essential questions-mortality, identity, the meaning of life-aren't simply food for thought; they're grounds for entertainment."-Toronto Star"Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young's hilarious and cautionary poems."-BooklistBender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young's twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young's poems flash with extravagant im...

“Poetry,” writes best-selling author Ellen Bass, “is the way I pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray. It’s the way I embody my love for the world.”The Human Line, Bass’ seventh book of poems, startles with its precise detail, intimate images, and wild metaphors. Bass brings attention to life’s endearing absurdities, and many of the poems flash with a keen sense of humor. She also faces many of the crucial moral dilemmas of our time—geneti...

"Young has always stood out for his sharp humor, boundless poetic energy, and sheer readability. If adventurous poetry can sometimes feel like a tenuous tightrope walk, Young's poems feel more like zip lines."-The Boston Globe"This book reads like a long, breathless thank-you for life's seemingly random jumble of beauty, strangeness, tenderness, and joy."-Los Angeles TimesFall Higher is a major collection by one of America's most inventive and ent...

For a long time, people have looked to science as a way to understand their own lives. But while science has proven itself a useful metaphor, it has just as often been exposed as being as fallible as the flawed humans who lean on it. Newcomer Leigh Kotsilidis's lively, thoughtful and refreshingly speculative first collection engages and questions the linguistic roots of the hypothetical, both as they apply to the Scientific Method and its faith in certainty, and tothe word's alternate mean...

This luminous collection is Maxine Kumin's twelfth volume of poetry, the first since her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo.Themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery appear here, along with poems addressing the eminent dead: Wordsworth, Gorki, Rukeyser, and others. "Inescapably, many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to," Kumin says.