Monthly Archive:: July 2011
Meter
I am a poet without a kind. I write formal poems in an age of free verse (not to mention poetry in an age of prose!), but I don’t feel kinship with the most visible formalist movements. The divide I feel goes beyond subject matter and worldview, though these
Our Third Free Ploughshares: Sherman Alexie
Once again, we are delving into the annals of Ploughshares history for our contest. This week, we’re featuring the Sherman Alexie issue from Winter 2000. All you need to do to win this wonderful issue is provide a comment in the response section below detailing why you love Sherman
The Pun Also Rises
The Pun Also Rises John Pollack Gotham Books, April 2011 240 pages $22.50 I’ve long loved wordplay, and long been puzzled, too, that many in the literary community don’t—especially, it seems, in my peculiar branch of it in Boston. Aren’t writers meant to be passionate about words and all
Why I Reread Lithium for Medea
I came to Kate Braverman through her story “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” which appears in the collection Squandering the Blue and was chosen for the Best American Short Stories in 1991. In 1991 I was still in college, which is to say a tiny, evangelical college in
Books for the Beltane Season
Diana’s e-mail that Ploughshares was interested in blogs about summer reading was a happy occasion, and not only because it preempted that sometimes-desperate scrabble for appropriate blog topics, as in (because I also teach grammar and usage) “Brian! Would anybody read it if I blogged about the semi-colon versus