Ploughshares Winter 2001-02 Guest-Edited by Jorie Graham

The Spring 2004 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Jorie Graham. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (The Dream of the Unified Field, Never), this issue features new works from poets such as Cole Swensen, Saskia Hamilton, Max Winter, Dean Young, and Lucy Ives. In Graham's introduction to the issue, she challenges the trend of some contemporary poetry that creates "no shared or shareable human occasion behind it," existing rather as a "self-indulgence, a thing 'made of words.'" Instead, she claims that poetry should create "the sensation of something that feels corporeal reaching out to find what is corporeal in me, finding the portals where that sensorial access moves up pathways to mind, and spirit."

There is also an eclectic selection of fiction, ranging from Chelsey Johnson's story of a young woman feeling the death of the world around her, to Michael Huffman's description of a fatally-unorthodox Good Friday parade, to Thomas O'Malley's characterization of a child's mother who speaks with the dead.


INTRODUCTION
Jorie Graham, "Something of Moment"

FICTION

"Hummingbirds," by Diane Ackerman
"Eruption," by Emily Hammond
"The Good Friday Procession," by Michael Huffman
"Pinhead, Moonhead," by Chelsey Johnson
"Tickle Torture," by Thomas H. McNeely
"Humility," by Jane Miller
"The Banshee," by Thomas O'Malley

POETRY

Rick Barot
Cal Bedient
Robert N. Casper
Can Chiasson
Joshua Clover
Jon Davis
Katie Ford
Forrest Gander
Greg Glazner
Saskia Hamilton
Matthea Harvey
Lucy Ives
David Kirby
Joanna Klink
Mark Levine
James McCorkle
Laura Mullen
Bin Ramke
Srikanth Reddy
Frances Richard
Peter Richards
Tessa Rumsey
Cole Swensen
Michael Tyrell
Sam White
Max Winter
Dean Young

EDITOR PROFILE
Robert N. Casper

POSTSCRIPTS
Zacharis Award Winner Aleksander Hemon