Ploughshares Winter 2018-2019 - Edited by Ladette Randolph and John Skoyles

The Winter 2018-2019 edition of Ploughshares really brought the short of short fiction. Most of the short stories are ten pages or less. And the poems in this one are interspersed. For only 221 pages, this one packs a lot of different feels. 

I've been doing this Ploughshares thing for a while now, so I'll stick to what was best, but know that every edition is solid and worth the time. 

What was the best of the best were the Emerging Writers Winners. While I enjoyed reading many of the stories and poems in the collection, it's these three that I return to again and again in my mind. Like running a new stone in between thumb and forefinger until it's worn smooth and I know the shape of it.

I'm not sure how the winners are deemed "emerging". For instance, in fiction, Anne de Marcken has been writing for quite some time. Her story, "Foil" she says took her twelve years to right. It's artistry is evident in the first sentence:

"My mother gives birth to me again and again, multiplying my body to outnumber the deaths she foresees, until I can do it myself and can no longer tell the difference between the first me and the many who follow."

I mean, what? The story is short but you have to stay with it - to feel it, again and again. Here's another which is a repeated theme and which is an example of the language I love here:

"My silence is lit by the stroboscopic flutter of an entire generation of moths clambering at a bare bulb. If I were a bare bulb, which I am, I would know what it feels like to be mistaken for the moon, to suffocate." 

The language is so strange but beautiful but not in a pretentious way that I found myself reading, re-reading and re-reading the paragraphs again and again. 

The same mood can be said for poetry winner Alycia Pirmohamed for her collection of poems that explore the second-generation distance between the origins of her ancestors and her own genetic make up. The poems are chock-full of metaphors that poetry judge Roger Reeves says are "at once embodied and cerebral, emotionally rigorous and intellectually arresting." I can't describe that better so I won't try. I'll just leave you with this phrase from "Ways of Looking":

"This mosque is a cut of apple-I mistake each slice for a mouth"

You can continue here after you're done puzzling on that one.

Lastly, the Nonfiction winner, Laura Price Steele's essay "These Bodies Will Undo Us" is such an open, honest reflection of her relationship following her partner's transition. This story has three things going on, the partner's transition, a hunting trip to Montana, and an ill dog. And for whatever reason it all just works. It's probably because of these arresting insights:

"It surprised me just how much of myself I had to cut away to avoid the subject, how my new tentative friendships seemed drained of the lifeblood they required to survive. The more I spoke about myself, the more misshapen my life became. Just saying that I had moved to the city where my husband found a job felt deeply dishonest, as if I was tapping into a long line of history that was not mine to claim."

4/5 Stars.