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 ...

Vivek Shraya's debut collection of poetry is a bold and timely interrogation of skin-its origins, functions, and limitations. Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible and undeniable.Vivek Shraya is a writer, musician, and filmmaker whose previous books include God Loves Hair

Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada’s most recognized poets. The first part of the book, Dangerous Sound,” contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. Muskrat Woman,” the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The ...

‘All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant ‘image’ of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into ...

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.

Looking for a new favorite poet but love the classics? Kathy is a new poet who writes in old forms. Sonnets, dizains, and villanelles play among the pages of this tiny slice of verbal art. The rhymes and rhythms within will call your soul to return time and again to wear the edges of the pages until they rest within your heart.

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

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Rodney DeCroo's second poetry collection, Next Door to the Butcher Shop, explores the permeability of memory and uncovers heart-wrenching beauty from shadowy grit.How quickly agedescends on us. Our memories are mapsto places that don't exist. I was an emperoron a green lawn wearing a white sheetand a paper crown. The birds sang my praisesfrom the hedges and the treesDeCroo unsentimentally recounts momen...

A legend of 19th century French Canadian poetry, Émile Nelligan was only 16 when he fell under the influence of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and began writing taut, confidently surrealistic poems, shot through self-lacerating melancholy. Three years later, when a mental collapse led to his life-long institutionalization in 1899, he had already produced an impressive body of work. Translating Nelligan’s “essential” poems, along with a sharp introduction contextualizing his legacy as one of the “f...

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...