PLOUGHSHARES

Seas are lapping at the edges of civilization. These days, our planet’s excess heat is swirling pockets of ocean into powerful storms that rip away at the continents on which we live. Where land and water meet, cars, trees, and homes become shrapnel in wind and water’s explosion

PLOUGHSHARES

At this moment in Earth’s history, human influence dominates most ecosystems. We flatten forests and raise islands out of the sea; we propel ourselves through the air in winged metal cages. But despite our species’ external advances, humanity remains limited by the bodies we inhabit.

PLOUGHSHARES

Danez Smith’s second full-length book of poems, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf 2017), takes up the project of rehumanizing black lives, reshaping lament into forward-looking prophecy. The collection’s opening epic poem, “summer, somewhere,” acts as a book of re-creation, turning premature mortality into a revived, embodied love drawn from the earth itself.

PLOUGHSHARES

Cathy Park Hong’s sonorous triptych Engine Empire reshapes the Western’s tropes into a chilling interrogation of digitally facilitated detachment. Its opening section, “The Ballad of Our Jim,” is voiced by a band of brothers who flee service in the Civil War to chase the West’s disordered bloodshed. While Hong’s point of view centered on the “we” implicates the reader in the collective, her speakers’ drawl and lilt conjure a bygone dialect.