Ploughshares Spring 2021 Guest-edited by Laura van den Berg

by Laura van den Berg, Helen Phillips, Fernando A. Flores

The Spring 2021 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 Laura van den Berg writes in her introduction, “At its core, literature is perhaps about simultaneously engaging with the past, with the ugliness and strangeness and wonder of history, while also creating new shapes on the page...In all of the works included in this issue, I felt the awesome gale-force of imagination blowing through the lines and the sentences; I felt possibility; I felt a meaningful augmentation to the collective understanding taking place.” The Spring 2021 issue features poetry and prose by Helen Phillips, Fernando Flores, Kaveh Akbar, Eloisa Amezcua, Carl Phillips, and many others.

Genres: Poetry

252 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 10, 2021

About the author

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Laura is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard. Her next novel, State of Paradise, is forthcoming from FSG in July 2024. She lives in the Hudson Valley.

Reviews

[Susan Emmet · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I liked the poetry far better than than the fiction in this issue, perhaps I'm still in pandemic fatigue mode and so found the anthology hard to digest and terribly dark.
Don't have time to write much today.
Suffice it to say that the range of topic and author is wide and exposes readers to people they may not have read yet. That's a very good thing.
I'm haunted by Seth Wang's "The Cacophobe."

[Sher Hagmier · Rating 2 out of 5]

i mean, it was fine? the poems (?) didnt really speak to me and most of them either kind of felt random or just didnt finish the story and kinda were just there. im sure this book is perfect for someone else tho

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had planned to abandon this in another country when I finished it, and found myself unable.

[Lucian Childs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This week, I finally got around to Ploughshares Spring 2021 issue, edited by Laura van den Berg. Van den Berg, a writer of both novels and short stories, has assembled an impressive group of fiction writers in this issue. (I’m not qualified to comment on the poetry and non-fiction.)

’Pemi Auguda’s “Imagine Me Carrying You” is a young woman’s touching account of her mother’s disapproval, one exacerbated by the older woman’s depression over having accidentally killed someone.

In Venita Blackburn’s “Ambien and Brown Liquor” a daughter deals with the aftermath of her mother’s anguish—this time in a conversation with her sister that masks “all the erratic chemicals of grief and abandonment.”

In Tania James’s fantastical and beautiful “Bark” yet another daughter processes her mother’s disintegration, of sorts, in a conclusion that feels, like all the best endings, unexpected and wise.
Fajer Alexander Hansa’s “Seaworthy” documents a mother’s anguish and her son’s desperate flight to Greece along with other Syrian immigrants, a group that, like the boat they sail upon, is anything but seaworthy.

In Zora Mai Quỳnh’s “Her Infectious Laugh” a mother’s disdain for her daughter’s pregnant wife is no match for a good bout of laughter.

Seth Wang breaks the maternal theme with the gothic and outrageous “The Cacophobe,” an entertaining tall tale of a man who from boyhood is “deathly allergic to ugliness.” Literally.

There are more excellent stories here, all in first person narration, an editorial decision that unifies the wildly disparate pieces of this marvelous collection. { Cross-posted at my website. }

View all my reviews

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10.
Favorite fiction: Ambien and Brown Liquor, Black Communion, Nostradamus Baby, Bark, How I Came to Understand, & Her Infectious Laugh.
Favorite poems: Glossary for What You Left Unsaid: Puñal, A Huge Loop-de-Loop in the Blue: What is That?, Someone Told Us Streetlights Kicked on Midafternoon, sky, Insomnio, El abrazo, The Last Communist, & Poem About My Life.
Favorite essay: Essay on Anita Brookner

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Literary collections are always somewhat hit-or-miss, but this is a solid collection.