Spring 2017
Spring 2017
The Spring 2017 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; the Winter issue is staff-edited.
Acclaimed writer Jennifer Haigh guest-edits this poetry and prose issue of Ploughshares. As Haigh writes in her introduction, “By training or habit or simply natural inclination, the writer of literature is sensitive to invisible currents in the culture. We are made of porous stuff, highly absorbent. The writer is the box of baking soda at the back of the refrigerator, absorbing whatever is ambient.” With new poetry from Kaveh Akbar and Matthew Lippman, nonfiction from Vendela Vida, and fiction from Smith Henderson, Kristen Iskandrian, and Jess Walter, the work in this issue grapples with the current cultural environment.
The issue is dedicated to Thomas Lux (1946-2017), a guest editor and longtime friend of Ploughshares, and a former Poet-in-Residence of Emerson College.
Introduction
Fiction
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The Weeds
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Negative Space
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Life in the Heart of the Dead
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Muscles
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The Taster
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Blood Knot
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Simulacrum
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Silk and Dust
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One Part Finger
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Fran’s Friend Has Cancer
Nonfiction
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Wedding, Funeral, Bride
Poetry
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Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood
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Ways to Harm a Thing
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Surfacing
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Parable: Jackrabbit Belly
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Self-Portrait as a Dead Black Boy
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34
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35
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36
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Birds Eating Cherries from the Very Old Tree
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Momma Galya Armolinskaya
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Momma Galya Refuses Arrest
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Gunshot
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Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins
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We Watch Them Take Alfonso
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If, Then
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Position Paper #14: The Pacific Gyre
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Position Paper #18: Insurance
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Position Paper #19: Donald Trump
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Position Paper #20: Positions
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Watergate
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Poem with Warehouse Fire & Disaster Recovery Team
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A Disease of the Mind
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Now You Can Join the Others
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No Claim
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Problems with a Right Hand Turn
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(Adirondack)
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Rough Air
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Backseat in Kinsasha
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Poland, 1981
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Wild Columbine