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...

Standoff Terrain takes its inspiration from Sun TzusThe Art of War. It is a book of love poems for losers, and since almost everybody has lost at love… well, this book is probably for you. In the end, these poems are about how power and lack of power affect who and why we love.

Dionne Brand’s hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. She leads a solitary clandestine life, crossing borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises ...

The Fleece Era is Yukon-based, UK-born Joanna Lilley's first book of poems: a wry and eloquent testament to the intricacies of our various relationships. From the shattered pieces of our environmental puzzles to the labyrinth of family dynamics, Lilley makes these dilemmas come alive. Chillingly sparse, attractively odd and refreshingly frank, The Fleece Era embraces the complexities of human life with an unsettling mix of the sardonic and the compassionate.

A collection of 22 haiku poems, depicting love and seasons.

A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions – even unpleasant ones – stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province.The manatee wades out of the water and roars at the sightseersThat one of them owes him a drink.From the beach belo...

Short-listed for the 1999 CLA Book of the Year for Children AwardAward-winning poet and playwright Barbara Nickel returns to her Prairie roots in a beautiful collection of seasonal poems that chart, with a bird’s-eye view of the western landscape, nature’s glorious playground. Nickel’s experimental verses are perfectly complimented by Kathy Thiessen’s black-and-white etchings, making this ideal for any young Canadian – Prairie-dweller, would-be poet, or otherwise.

Stania Slahors reverberations: collage of dreams presents a collection of verse that covers a lifetime of poetic musing. Some of her poems describe in scintillating imagery life on the ocean along the Mexican coast where she winters. In other poems, she captures the traumatic and heartwarming memories of growing up in wartime Bohemia through her attention to poetic detail and communing with nature. Throughout reverberations, Slahor eloquently expresses a distillation of love and l...

In Prime, Miranda Pearsons first collection of poetry, the narratives of female identity, the white wedding, and the enshrined position of the mother are interrogated, using the lyric as a form of cultural critique in an examination and mockery of romantic love and heterosexual relationships. At the same time, the poems constitute an irreverent, lush romp, a celebration of friendship and absurdity.Gritty and darkly humorous, Pearsons verses address modern myths head-on in a world w...

So many emotions in one place...Growing up in a broken home really allows you see the world differently.In this collection of poetry, I have tried to capture the true emotion of growing up. With a unique blend of light and dark reflection , I give the reader an insight into my own feelings and growth.I hope you take the time and let each poem take you on a journey into your own thoughts and feelings.

Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards Carla Hartsfield sings praises to the unusual: a rose blooming in December; an angel dancing on a cardiologist's scanner; Glenn Gould playing Brahms at Angelo's Garage. But these are common occurrences in Your Last Day on Earth, the everyday world and the metaphysical realm sharing the same ecstatic poem. Hartsfield transforms the contents of her psyche into music that we can all hear, the kind that replays for days in the dark, dreamy parts of our selv...

What began as a single poem written on a long drive into the countryside north of Glasgow has evolved into an imaginative collection exploring memory, journey, vulnerability, and love. This book of haunting verse ranges in theme, with observations on everything from a plane's ascent into the evening sky to imagined piano notes being absorbed by the earth. The beauty of Scotland combines with a sense of human fragility as the poems examine the relationship of an old Spanish exile and his wi...