Ploughshares Spring 2020 - Edited by Tracy K. Smith

This Spring 2020 Edition of Ploughshares really delivered on the poetry front. The crazy thing about poetry is how many different feelings and looks you can get in reading a handful of poems. Perhaps it seems like you could read them faster than a novel, but when you switch to a new poem you have to recalibrate your brain and expectations and feelings every time.

This edition had some great poems. Some of my favorites:

Beer Run by Jared Harel
Love Song with Contradictions by Ellen Kombiyil
Daughter by Danusha Lameris - "I always wanted a daughter, which is to say, I wanted a better self" wow.
Slither by Danusha Lameris - "That was when I knew I'd become a stranger to the world."
After the Funeral by Roger Reeves

As for Fiction
The West We Leave by Kailyn McCord was a post apocalyptic tale of an abandoned California following massive and sustaining earthquakes. I always love a good tale that imagines what will happen if the world completely changes.

Dead Horn by Kirstin Valdez Quade was a great story about a family coping in the aftermath of a parent's death and the way circumstances can bend familial roles when trying to account for an absence.

Plastic Knives by Koye Oyedeji was so intriguing in its development of the story about an elderly lady waiting for her caregiver to take her to the park, but gets a completely different unexpected visitor.

And finally, in Nonfiction

What Money Can't Buy by Dawn Lundy Martin about a back to school shopping trip between an aunt and her nieces. What is the role of a prosperous aunt to her nieces living in less than ideal circumstances? How much will one shopping trip change their outlook and expectations for life?

4/5 Stars. 

Ploughshares Winter 2019-2020

One of the best parts about the Winter Ploughshares edition is that it includes the emerging writers contest winners. The stories always feel fresh and vibrant. (Even though I'm an edition behind in reading). So in no particular order, here are some of my favorite stories and poems from this edition:

Poetry:
Contender - Traci Brimhall
"It's alright to overdress for the riot. Your rage is stunning." And that's just the opening line. This poem. Guys its urgent and truth and just great.
Losing - Kerrin McCadden
A poem for a lost brother. There's a longing here that is felt acutely even though this poem is short.

Fiction:
Once a River - Daryl Farmer
In this story a journalist struggles with his privilege in reporting conditions in a refugee camp while having access to the dictator whose cruelty is well known. "Evil relies on a belief of its own inevitability, that it is a force that cannot ever be eradicated." Thinks the journalist as he rides in a helicopter with the dictator back to the refugee camp for nothing that can be good. Amid such evil what can one person do?

The Age of Migration - Kai Maristed
Charley and Karim move to France and Karim undergoes a radicalization. Charley gets entangled with another man who wants to take her away to America. She has choices, but does she? Charley is caught between obligations and understandings. She may or may not be free. It's a very nuanced, well written story.

Noise - Katherine Sharpe
I really liked this story about an aging rock star and a young journalist who has come to interview her. They've shared a lover and Luce thinks of the absurdity of this while also dealing with some teenage rebellion from her daughter.

An Older Woman - Diana Spechler
I also liked this story of a man hiding from his pain in a casual relationship with an older woman. The story starts out and you think it's about the woman but it's really about the man.

Emerging Writers
And not to be missed are the emerging writers winners:
Nonfiction - Pojangmacha People - Jung Hae Chae
A fluid retelling of generations of family trauma caused by alcoholism and enabling.

Poetry - a psalm in which i demand a new name for my kindred - Aurielle Marie
A love poem to friends and friendships. Full of inside jokes that read more like clues than snubs to a reader outside the circle.

Fiction - Creation - Ruby Todd
A sculpture artists finds inspiration in a dress bought on a whim for a party she didn't want to go to. I loved the artist's surprise at her own talent.

4/5 Stars. 

Calypso - David Sedaris

I should start out by saying that I love David Sedaris. I've seen him read live and I'm going again in April because it's not just what he says, but how he says it that makes him so funny. I first became acquainted with him through NPR's This American Life. I've picked up his books here and there but I honestly can't say if I read a story in a collection, heard it on TAM, watched in a dramatized version of Santaland Diaries, or heard it live in an author talk with the man himself.

In any case, Calypso presents the best of David Sedaris. He presents both the good and the bad - the neurotic-ism with the whimsy. He gives you the right balance and blend of both the tragic and the mundane and finds humor in places that are dark. Calypso deals a lot with his sister Tiffany's suicide and the family's aftermath. I had somehow missed the news about her death which it first happened several years ago so when I read about it in the opening story, I thought, "oh-no, the sister with the rickshaw." And somehow I think David Sedaris would be okay with this memory that he gave me of Tiffany and a rick-shaw.

But as funny as David Sedaris is, he doesn't pull any punches on getting real on the dark stuff. As in when he casually reveals in one story about his last time seeing his sister before she took her own life. So somehow, instead of diminishing the humor in the book, it actually makes the humor feel more earned.

Ready David Sedaris is really like curling up on the couch with a glass of wine and an old friend and saying, "So tell me what's been going on with you?"

4/5 Stars.