This post contributed by Anne Champion. Petrarchan Kristina Marie Darling BlazeVOX Books, 2013 69 pages $16.00 Kristina Marie Darling’s accolades already include eleven books of poetry, and her newest collection, Petrarchan, keeps up with this furious creative momentum. In Darling’s past work, she has carved out a form of

Whether it’s in the wake of a zombie apocalypse in “The Walking Dead,” on an electro-magnetic island in “Lost,” or on Capitol Hill in “House of Cards,” any television show that portrays the fight for survival always seems to need the same kinds of characters. But these archetypes don’t

Welcome to Round 2 of the Ploughshares Fantasy Blog Draft! As far as I, your humble commissioner, am concerned, this is when the draft really begins. The chosen editors have been shuffled into their imaginary Fantasy Blog Team locker rooms, behind the stage of Radio City Music Hall; the

In my last post I discussed the frequent dissimilarity between the actual American suburbs and their depictions in most novels we tend to think of as “suburban.” This is not to say, though, that the reality of contemporary suburban life remains unaddressed in today’s fiction. Here I’d like to

Every March my eyes turn south toward spring training. The sunburned announcers report from director’s chairs on games that don’t count. The players work on their autographs and perfect their sunflower seed spits. Teenagers called up from the lowercase “a” team —hardly more than little leaguers—pitch, bat, and field,