Vivid poems full of drama and action by award-winning poet Stuart Dischell.Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, and always transformative, The Lookout Man embodies the energy, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell’s poetry. Inhabiting a mix of lyric structures, these poems are set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from the backyards of America to the streets of international c...

The Summer 2018 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year’s four issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles; the Fall and Winter issues are staff-edited.As guest-editor Jill McCorkle writes in her introduction, “Some of the most satisfying moments in fiction are those where I might gasp with shock or surprise only to immediately see that I should have known, that in...

There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell’s fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns outwardly social and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfig...

Stuart Dischell's poetry is passionate, darkly comic, heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. Dig Safe reaffirms why he commands high regard among poets and critics and popularity among his readers. Taking as their metaphor the markings that construction workers use to warn of utilities below street level—these new poems pierce the body politic as they evoke interconnection and misalliance, movement and inhabitation.

Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of Backwards Days are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell’s poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of Backwards Days are most particularly...