An energetic exploration of the expanse of language translated and otherwise transformedIn Renditions Reginald Gibbons conducts an ensemble of poetic voices, using the works of a varied, international selection of writers as departure points for his translations and transformations. The collection poses the idea that all writing is, at least abstractly, an act of translation, whether said act “translates” observation into word or moves ideas from one language to another. T...

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways—guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed articulation that expands inner experience, imagining with words what cannot always be imagined without them. Through translation, poetry has diversified poetic traditions, and some of poetry's ways of thinking begin in the ancient world and remain po...

Young Woman with a Cane explores the social, cultural, and personal dimensions of feeling, experience, and thought. This new collection by Reginald Gibbons ranges from nature and ecological crises to human conflicts of migration, self-determination, ancient war, and the corruption of political mores. In language intensified by strong rhythms, figures, and bounteous vocabulary, the book presents short lyrics alongside satires, laments, and witness, with subjects moving from elk in ...

From RitualA slow parade of old west enthusiasts,camp song and hymn, came in along the windingway where rural declined to suburban, slowriders and wagoners passing a cow stakedto graze, some penned cattle looking vacantlyup—not in vacant lots the ancient iconsof wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,in sacrifices and customs of bride-priceor dowry. (It’s good people no longer makeblood sacrifices,...

Regarded by many as Euripides' masterpiece, Bakkhai is a powerful examination of religious ecstasy and the resistance to it. A call for moderation, it rejects the temptation of pure reason as well as pure sensuality, and is a staple of Greek tragedy, representing in structure and thematics an exemplary model of the classic tragic elements. Disguised as a young holy man, the god Bacchus arrives in Greece from Asia proclaiming his godhood and preaching his orgiastic religion. He expects to b...

This new collection by award-winning author Reginald Gibbons explores human experience and memory in ordinary settings-city apartments, rural roads, soap operas, and juvenile court-as way to understand the depths of thought and feeling in our everyday encounters. These narrative meditations explode with imagery, looking and listening deeply into our everyday experience-the extraordinary within the ordinary, the impossible within the possible.Reginald Gibbons is the...

Goyen passes on traditional conventions of plot and character. The House of Breath is an address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in small Texas town, Charity. The novel is a meditation on the nature of identity and origins, memory, and time's annihilation of life. This is the restored version, going back to Goyen's originally published version from 1950 with an afterword from Reginald Gibbons, professor of English at Northwestern University and t...

The Winter 2023-24 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 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval,...

Oedipus, the former ruler of Thebes, has died. Now, when his young daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Kreon, the new ruler, because he has prohibited the burial of her dead brother, she and he enact a primal conflict between young and old, woman and man, individual and ruler, family and state, courageous and self-sacrificing reverence for the gods of the earth and perhaps self-serving allegiance to the gods of the sky. Echoing through western culture for more than two millennia, Sophocles...