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.

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...

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...

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...

I had found it! This house was the perfect place to write the great American novel. I tumbled into bed, anxious to start the next day. Within half an hour, I was awake again. The sounds were back.I got up and peered out the window. That's when I saw it. In the ghostly light of a half moon shining through the darkness, I saw a young girl chopping at the trunk of a huge oak tree behind the house. She was only about five or six years old, wearing a tattered dress that was soaked in the...

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize"You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity," says The Village Voice. Indeed, Lydia Davis is mathematician, philosopher, sculptor, jeweler, and scholar of the minute. Few writers map the process of thought as well as she, few perceive with such charged intelligence.T...

"A challenging collection that should more than satisfy [Rich's] large and loyal following."—Washington Post Book WorldIn this volume, Adrienne Rich pursues her signature themes and takes them further: the discourse between poetry and history, interlocutions within and across gender, dialogues between poets and visual artists, human damages and dignity, and the persistence of utopian visions. Here Rich continues taking the temperature of mind and body in h...

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preocc...

From the beginning of time man has survived on his own knowledge and skills passed down from one generation to the next. Whether it is constructing a shelter, gathering food, or preparing for war, man has continually progressed with technology in every way possible. We now live in luxurious homes filled with flat screen TVs, iPods, and other gadgets that we have become spoiled to. We have supermarkets and restaurants at every corner; making it convenient to grab a bite of food. Today, many...

Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems tou...

Death Valley is a strange and unique area found in the state of California in the United States. What makes this area so different, and what mysteries does it hold? Read on and find out fun facts such as:When do the animals in Death Valley hibernate?Is Death Valley above or below sea level?What happens to most of the rain that tries to fall in Death Valley?What happens to your teeth when you smile in Death Valley?Find out more about Death Valley and ama...