Ploughshares Spring 2008 Guest-Edited by B. H. Fairchild

by B. H. Fairchild (Editor), Maile Meloy, D. Nurkse, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Tony Hoagland

Overview

The Spring 2008 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by B. H. Fairchild. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.

Guest-edited by acclaimed poet B. H. Fairchild (Usher, The Art of the Lathe), the Spring 2008 issue of Ploughshares contains prose and poetry by authors including Maile Meloy, Bob Hicok, and Tony Hoagland. In his Introduction to the issue, Fairchild says, "Running throughout this issue, through not by editorial design, is that typically postmodern sense of absence, in so many configurations: in the memoir, for instance, as loss; or in fiction, as the absence of fulfilled desire, the basic plot of a story being that someone wants something and has problems getting it; or in poetry, as the kind of absence that is also presence—what is not said, what cannot be said, but which haunts or illumines or in some way alters what is otherwise explicit."

Full Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
B. H. Fairchild

EDITOR PROFILE
Rebecca Morgan Frank

FICTION

"Honeymoon," by Barbara Dimmick
"Tom & Jerry," by Christie Hodgen
"Stolpestad," William Lychack
"Agustin," by Maile Meloy
"Mandelbaum, the Criminal," by Gerald Shapiro

NONFICTION

"Missing the Dead," by James Brown
"Unanimal," by Alexis Wiggins

POETRY

Betty Adcock
William Baer
Christopher Bakken
George Bilgere
Michelle Boisseau
Bruce Bond
Elizabeth Bradfield
Robert Cording
Chad Davidson
Stephen Dunn
Peter Everwine
Gary Fincke
Gregory Fraser
Carol Frost
Allen Grossman
R. S. Gwynn
Rachel Hadas
Mary Stewart Hammond
Sarah Hannah
C. G. Hanzlicek
Bob Hicok
Tony Hoagland
Colette Inez
Roy Jacobstein
Mark Jarman
Ted Kooser
Jeffrey Levine
David Mason
Michael Meyerhofer
Robert Mezey
D. Nurkse
Alicia Ostriker
Alison Pelegrin
Catherine Pierce
Ron Rash
Jay Rogoff
Clare Rossini
Faith Shearin
Maurya Simon
Julie Suk
Anne-Marie Thompson
David Tucker
Charles Harper Webb
Alan Williamson
Irene Willis

EDITORS' SHELF

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016235288
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	04/15/2008
Series:	Ploughshares , #341
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	214
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

B.H. Fairchild was born in 1942 in Houston, Texas, and grew up in small towns in Texas and Kansas. The son of a lathe operator, he attended the University of Kansas and the University of Tulsa. His poetry explores the empty landscapes of the region of his birth, and the lives of its working-class residents, including his own family and friends. Frequently described as a poet of the “sacred,” Fairchild’s work has gained renown for its marriage of high and low culture and art, as well as its interest in evoking beauty in quotidian memories and events. According to Paul Mariani, “Like William Carlos Williams, James Wright, and James Dickey, all writing in the American grain, [Fairchild] insist[s] on the beauty to be found in what seems to be a desolate landscape.” Fairchild’s books of poetry include The Arrival of the Future (1985; reissued 2000); The Art of the Lathe (1998), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2004), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the California Book Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; Local Knowledge (2005); and Usher: Poems (2009).


Fairchild has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, the Arthur Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, among others. His work appears widely and he has taught at numerous institutions. He is currently a professor of English at the University of North Texas.