The Spring 2008 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by B. H. Fairchild. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Guest-edited by acclaimed poet B. H. Fairchild (Usher, The Art of the Lathe), the Spring 2008 issue of Ploughshares contains prose and poetry by authors including Maile Meloy, Bob Hicok, and Tony Hoagland. In his Introduction to the issue, Fairchild says, "Running throughout this issue, through not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry, as the kind of absence that is also presence—what is not said, what cannot be said, but which haunts or illumines or in some way alters what is otherwise explicit."