**2022 Christianity Today Award of Merit, Missions & Global Church"A powerful and moving collection of sermonic letters"** --Tim Challies"If we want revival in our communities, then let us learn from those being revived." For many Western Christians, the experience of suffering and persecution is remote. For Chinese Christians, on the other hand, persecution is a regular aspect of the Christian life. If a Christian from the West is transported to a Chinese house church, the...

A lyrical exploration of midlife, love, and loss from award-winning poet Timothy Liu.In Let It Ride, Timothy Liu integrates life's struggles at midlife through disintegration, leaving behind lyrical traces of poetry as a gambol and love as a gamble. These poems argue for a life that is more than amusement—rather, a mythic venture waiting to be embodied, embarked upon. Liu shows us that, sometimes, if you happen to get lucky, you just might stand a chance t...

In Liu's text the ascent, the ecstatic apprehension of the divine (he is a religious poet, there are no two ways about it, though perhaps there are twenty) can be effected only by a demonic insistence upon abjection, upon the descent. He shrives himself, and his poems show the marks of the lash--they are the lash--and his vision is naturalized to a degree that would astonish his predecessors, that astonishes us. This is a shocking poetry, and the shock is not of recognition, but of estrang...

The Winter 2024-25 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 Winter 2024-25 Issue, edited by John Skoyles, features poetry and prose by Joan Silber, Timothy Liu, Pádraig Ó Tuam...

A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, “is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases.”The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyric...

What is the hottest American export since 9/11? The contributors to this provocative volume contend that it is Western style globalism-the dominant free market ideology that determines everything from most-favored-nation status to the declaration of war. In this much-needed post-September 11 analysis, an interdisciplinary team of authors shows how central concepts like globalization, liberty, free markets, and free trade are increasingly being subordinated to and lumped together with the w...

There has been growing attention paid to urban agriculture worldwide because of its role in making cities more environmentaly sustainable while also contributing to enhanced food access and social justice. This edited volume brings together current research and case studies concerning urban agriculture from both the Global North and the Global South. Its objective is to help bridge the long-standing divide between discussion of urban agriculture in the Global North and the Global South and...

"This is criticism at its best." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesWriting in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and violence in art. From Sylvia Plath’s poetry to Francis Bacon’s paintings, from the Saw franchise to Yoko Ono’s performance art, Nelson’s nuanced exploration across the artistic landscape ultimatel...

Offers a stimulating introduction to globalization and its varying impacts across, between, and within societies. It is a highly readable book that contributes to a better understanding of the crucial aspects and dimensions of the developments and transformations that go by the name of globalization. - ;'Globalization' has become the buzz-word of our time. A growing number of scholars and political activists have invoked the term to describe a variety of changing economic, political...

“Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters.”—Nadine GordimerAcross more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ world...

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from ec...

Harsha Walia has played a central role in building some of North America’s most innovative, diverse, and effective new movements. That this brilliant organizer and theorist has found time to share her wisdom in this book is a tremendous gift to us all.”-Naomi Klein, author of The Shock DoctrineUndoing Border Imperialism combines academic discourse, lived experiences of displacement, and movement-based practices into an exciting new book. By reformulating immigrant rights ...