Amidst cycles of heartbreak, trauma, and chronic pain, Love Prodigal finds strength in the natural world, motherhood, desire, and new love.Fiercely self-aware and “utterly present tense,” Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned ...

Written during the trial for a close friend’s murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious fourth collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend’s murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, an...

"[Brimhall] allows us brief visions, glimpses, of experiences more lush and raw than our own."—The Rumpus"With a stunning mastery of metaphor, linguistic precision, and a soulful determined vision, Brimhall's work reveals an artist tuned to the significance of everyday experience."—Dorianne Laux"Saudade" is a Portuguese word referring to a quality of longing that has no direct translation into English. Inspired by stories from her Brazilian-born mother, Traci Brimh...

The Spring 2026 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.The Spring 2026 issue, edited by Annie Finch, features poetry and prose by Traci Brimhall, Molly Dektar, Jane Hirshfield, Shane McCrae, Jessica Roede...

For fans of Six Feet Under and Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity comes a meditation on grief, death, and art by award-winning author Traci BrimhallThe Grief Artist is the nonfiction debut from award-winning poet Traci Brimhall. This essay collection is a meditation about grief, death, art and how we live today in contemporary American culture. Brimhall travels around the country visiting ghost towns, haunted houses, hospice patients and devo...