The Summer 2016 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.This 45th anniversary issue, guest edited by novelist Claire Messud and literary critic James Wood, includes new work from Viet Thanh Nguyen (winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize), Lydia Davis, Carys Davies, an...

Here's a spooky story: Slenderman has been seen around the world for over 2,000 years. This book - dedicated to the authors who tragically and violently lost their lives shortly after writing it - aims to tell you everything you want to know about Slenderman. What does he look like? What are his powers? What is his purpose? All this and more can be found within these very pages. Including excerpts from historical Slenderman documents (such as the 15th century poem that ends with the words ...

**AMY GERSTLER’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATIVE POETRY that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of *The Best American Poetry.***The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States today. Featuring poems from some of our country’s top bards, including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic, The Best American Poetry 2010 also present...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book ReviewYou never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak hims...

“Rich’s poetry itself is a mirror, reflecting the truths about humanity this discerning poet has come to understand.”—Booklist“Rich is one of the greatest American poets of the past half century . . . attested to both by the extraordinary power of her poems and by the laurels she’s racked up. . . . The events of our blood-dimmed decade have afforded Rich a subject for some of her strongest material.”—Sara Marcus, San Francisco Chronicle

The poems in this highly anticipated second book are elegiac poems, as concerned with honoring our dead as they are with praising the living. Through Aracelis Girmay's lens, everything is animal: the sea, a jukebox, the desert. In these poems, everything possesses a system of desire, hunger, a set of teeth, and language. These are poems about what is both difficult and beautiful about our time here on earth.Aracelis Girmay's debut collection won the Great Lakes Col...

Short offers the tradition and glorious present of these popular forms that stretch and defy genre. From 1500 to present, hundreds of pieces. Inventive, entertaining, and addictive.Short prose forms are elusive to define--one writer's prose poem is another's flash fiction or brief essay. Rather than quibble, Short opts for inclusiveness. Here is a dazzling array: 100s of pieces (under 1250 words) from 24 Western countries, written over five centur...

Beloved and inventive poet Denise Duhamel selects the poems for the 2013 edition of The Best American Poetry, “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).Over the last twenty-five years, the Best American Poetry series has become an annual rite of autumn, eagerly awaited and hotly debated: “an essential purchase” (The Washington Post). This year, guest editor Denise D...

Every year since 1988 a major poet has selected seventy-five poems for publication in The Best American Poetry. The series has quickly grown in both sales and prestige, as poetry itself has seen a remarkable resurgence in popularity and vitality, fueled by established poets at the peak of their powers and a new generation of daring voices. As we approach the millennium, now is the opportune moment to take stock of american poetry and choose the work that will stand the tes...

The latest installment of the yearly anthology of contemporary American poetry that has achieved brand-name status in the literary world.

In this posthumous collection from an avant-garde great, Hollo’s spare, sly, lyrical greatness is on display a final time."Someone comes alonggives that tedious old thinga new twist orbreaks its neckthe old questionsdon't change:what do you want me to say?what do you want me to do?"

A prose poem is a poem written in prose rather than verse. But what does that really mean? Is it an indefinable hybrid? An anomaly in the history of poetry? Are the very words "prose poem" an oxymoron? This groundbreaking anthology edited by celebrated poet David Lehman, editor of The Best American Poetry series, traces the form in all its dazzling variety from Poe and Emerson to Auden and Ashbery and on, right up to the present.In his brilliant and lucid introduction, Leh...