A poem by Newtown resident and published writer Charles Rafferty is in the newest issue of Ploughshares.

“Manifesto” was included in the winter 2022-23 issue of Ploughshares, published January 12.

Edited by Ladette Randolph, the issue features 48 pieces by Natalie Bakopoulos, Sven Birkerts, Serkan Görkemli, Alice Jolly, Kashona Notah, John Balaban, Sarah M. Brownsberger, Kirsty Gunn, and others.

Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, it has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats.

"Manifesto," its author told The Newtown Bee last week, is "a prose poem, so it dispenses with line breaks. It's just a paragraph. And the title, I'm hoping, signals that the poem is trying to make sense of the world, to declare something about it with a certainty that could well be misplaced.

"What is it declaring?" Rafferty continued. "I suppose that the world is always at least two things at once. The narrator wants the world to improve but also wants it to stay the same. The mammoth is extinct, but it keeps emerging from the permafrost. The poem knows that what used to be 'constants' — cursive, typewriters, muskets — eventually fade away. The poem is spoken by someone who understands all these things, and how nothing can or should be done about it."

Rafferty’s most recent collection of prose poems is A Cluster of Noisy Planets (BOA Editions, 2021). His 2017 collection, The Smoke of Horses, will be the featured title and Rafferty will be the guest author during the May 17 Newtown Authors Reading Series program at C.H. Booth Library.

His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Southern Review, and Ploughshares.

He currently co-directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at Westport Writers’ Workshop.

To learn more about Ploughshares — “the Triton among minnows,” according to The New York Times — or obtain a copy, visit pshares.org.