Spring 2020
Spring 2020
The Spring 2020 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 remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.”
As guest-editor Tracy K. Smith writes in her introduction, “I know the most urgent work ahead—for my daughter and for me—lies in striking the balance between fear, hope, and the willingness to keep at it...That’s the conversation—about what we fear, and what in light of our fear we must do—in which the many writerly voices gathered here seem to be engaged.” Featuring poetry and prose by Kirstin Valdez Quade, Dawn Lundy Martin, Denise Duhamel, Roger Reeves, Brenda Hillman, and many others.
Introduction
Fiction
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From Far Around They Saw Us Burn
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The West We Leave
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Plastic Knives
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Dead Horn
Nonfiction
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What Money Can’t Buy
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Blue Hour
Poetry
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From Il quaderno di Nerina (Nerina’s Notebook)
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For the Woman on Main Street Stopping to Pull Up Her Pantyhose
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Supposition
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The School of Eternities
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Interior Scroll
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My Brother’s Darkroom
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My Brother’s Rolltop Desk
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Irradiate
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My Late Wife
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The Morning Before the Rains Came
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Dead Name Elegy with Strap-on
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Beer Run
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Final Kindness
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Fourth poem for Nexplanon
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Slightly Less Stressful Walk Up Hill
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The Highest Part of the Dust
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Pecola’s Juggernaut
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Volunteer Lemons
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Love Song with Contradictions
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Daughter
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Slither
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Analysis
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I Got to Thinkin’
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Beginnings, December 20, 2018
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I Should Be Writing a Foreword
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After Trauma
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When They Called to Say She Had Died
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Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison Publicly Split, 1853
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Punch
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After the Funeral
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Motels We Stay in While Trying to Get Pregnant: The Grant
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what does it mean to be human?
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Being Ill
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Mebble
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[Night after night, what she saw in her sleep]
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Beautiful Now
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The Paintings of Agnes Martin as Loaves of Bread
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The Forgetting Game
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On Dizziness
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Deracinations: Seven Sonigrams
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Dog Tags
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Reprieve
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High Water