Following the news of a long-past lover’s death, In The Days That Followed grapples with the sudden knowledge of the existence of a stillborn child conceived out of wedlock and never named, and never spoken of after the relationship had ended. How do you miss someone who you never even knew?It is within this distillation of loss, of distance, and grief, that allows us to form the unborn, the unnamed, the absent parts of ourselves into the language, into th...

A uniquely chilling glimpse into the immense grief of losing loved ones to suicide.Anaphora is a gut-wrenching elegy with psychological intensity, giving way to the dizzying grief of loss. Goodan creates a heightened, frantic and piercing dialogue that grapples with mental illness, stigmas, relationships, and morality in the landscape of rural America.

A fireman’s perspective is unique, especially a wildland firefighter. There is a fair share of “gallows humor” that helps propel a dark and grim subject (as death is all but too common in the field).

Let the Voices is a book about the uneasiness of living with those whose lives have been cut short by the violence of poverty. Set in a trailer park on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, the speaker in these poems gives voice to childhood companions often hungry, both literally and figuratively, for a kind of salvation. In a splicing of lyric and narrative vignettes language becomes both subject and catalyst for recovering one's voice in a negligent world.

Mountain West Poetry SeriesPublished by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

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...