In The Next Sky, history haunts and poems grapple with nostalgia and pain, the ancient and contemporary, to make sense of the places they intersect.Pulsing with evocative voice and imagery, Sherwin Bitsui’s The Next Sky ruminates on the past, present, and future, questioning where living things fit into the puzzle of the natural world. Here, blackbirds sigh obsidian and the “land whispers its name.” The air is woven by laughter and breath becomes ...

“Bitsui’s poetry returns things to their basic elements and voice in a flowing language rife with illuminating images. A great reading experience for those who like serious and innovative poetry.” —Library JournalDrawing upon Navajo history and enduring tradition, Sherwin Bitsui leads us on a treacherous, otherworldly passage through the American Southwest. Fluidly shape-shifting and captured by language that functions like a moving camera, Dissolve is urban and r...

"Sherwin Bitsui's new poetry collection, *Flood Song—*a sprawling, panoramic journey through landscape, time, and cultures—is well worth the ride."—Poets & Writers“Bitsui’s poetry is elegant, probative, and original. His vision connects worlds.”—New Mexico Magazine“His images can tilt on the side of surrealism, yet his work can be compellingly accessible.”—Arizona Daily Star“Sherwin Bitsui sees violent beauty in the Americ...

Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”As guest-editor Rigoberto Gonzalez writes in his introduction, “Writing amplifies our questions and illumina...

Poems about a young two-spirit Indigenous man moving through shadow and trauma toward strength and awareness. Bones, Tyler Pennock’s wise and arresting debut, is about the ways we process the traumas of our past, and about how often these experiences eliminate moments of softness and gentleness. Here, the poems journey inward, guided by the world of dreams, seeking memories of a loving sister lost beneath layers of tragedy and abuse. With bravery, the poems stand up to the demons lurking i...

Being queer and Asian American; families we are born into and ones we chose; nostalgia, trauma and history—all dissected fearlessly.Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments...

In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.

If we had the chance to do things again differently, would we?Hard to say when the snow began falling. In the 2020s, there were rumors of global warming, of severe weather changes and it was not all rumor. Many of us could feel the changes. Warm and then cold. Rain and then the sunniest of days. Then all went bad, warmer and warmer each day.

In Kemi Ashing-Giwa's stunning post-apocalyptic short story, "Fruiting Bodies", a Tor.com Original, an alien fungal infection has ravaged a faraway planet, turning all but six of the colonists into ravenous alarinkiri.Inyama, a mycologist, is her species’ last hope. But it’s not expertise her fellow survivors want from her.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Shapero writes in an urgent vernacular that flirts, stings, implores and demands with apparent abandon.”-Houston ChronicleShapero’s poetics has real-world import for the way we use language to talk about messy things.”-VoltaThought-provoking and sardonically expressive, Shapero is a self-proclaimed hard child”-unafraid of directly addressing bleakness as she continually asks what it means to be human and to bring new life into the world. Hard Child

With her remarkable debut collection, Yukon poet Clea Roberts proffers a perceptive & ecological reading of the Canadian North’s past & present. Roberts deftly draws out the moments that comprise a cycle of seasons, paying as much attention to the natural—the winter moon’s second-hand light that pools in the tracks of tree squirrels & loose threads of migrating birds—as she does to the manufactured—the peripheral percussion of J-brakes & half-melted ice lanterns. She also casts her gaze ba...

“Dan Gerber tenderly reels his readers through the ‘beautiful movie’ he calls the passing of time on earth in a language completely unadorned and Zen-like in its quietude. The thing itself carries the weight of these poems, which recall the deep imagery of Vallejo, Neruda and Wright.”—Rain Taxi Dan Gerber is a master of layered, bittersweet imagery. In his seventh book of poems, he writes of childhood misgivings and fears, the oak savannah landscape of California’s central coast, ...