THE PUSHCART PRIZE XLVIII

Henderson’s annual labor-of-love anthology turns 48.

For nearly half a century, the Pushcart Prize volumes have served not just as showcases for exemplary writing but also as mirrors of their time: In one stretch everyone seemed to write like Raymond Carver, in another like Annie Proulx. This volume is more catholic than all that in style but is very much a mirror of current concerns. Editor Henderson himself sets the tone by decrying the thought that AI aims to replace flesh-and-blood writers, direly announcing, "For the record Pushcart will reject all chatbot plagiarisms and will ban forever any human attempting to foist machine products on our editors." The 63 selections that follow are human, all too human. Sophie Klahr’s poem "Tender" mourns the merciful euthanasia of a young black bear burned in a wildfire, closing with her instructions to her writing students: "I’ll say a sonnet is a little song / to hold a thing that otherwise cannot / be held: a lonely thing; a death; a bear." In "What if Putin Laughed," Steve Stern examines the figure of the shlemiel as "the quintessential Jewish archetype," closing his essay with a well-worn but still up-to-the-minute joke told on Vladimir Putin by Volodymyr Zelensky. Matthew Neill Null delivers "The Dropper," a powerful short story that portrays a dog rescuer forever troubled by the horrors that people can inflict on animals. "You talk to your neighbors, you figure out right quick who’d’ve been Nazis," he murmurs. And in "The Blob," an essay that’s both beautifully expressed and downright depressing, Molly Gallentine looks at climate change in part through the lens of the 1958 creature-feature film The Blob, closing on just the right note as the title critter is locked in ice: Says a policeman, "I don’t think it can be killed, but at least we’ve got it stopped.: Answers Steve McQueen, "Yeah, as long as the arctic stays cold."

The state of the art, and required reading for all students of contemporary writing.