Michael Hager is a Creative Writing and Visual Arts senior at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. This is his first poetry publication.

The Feral Issue

ns 73-74 | Fall 2009/Spring 2010

The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.

Read this Issue

Published Winter 2005

The Wings of Our Fathers

by Michael Hager | ns 63-64

I dream of the men who walk these passages
—veins are hallways in the back of hands.
Their steps scuff the entry like quick rumors.
I listen,
  then wake in the half light of early morning,
           still listening.

They leave only a hint of who they were:
  a scent of sweat and saltwater,
  field rock and factory ash.
Their pacing trails off eventually
  as feet press the stark carpeting of new rooms.

Vessels are stored atlas lines
  in the corridors of our bodies.
Their sons rise quietly,
pause a moment in that half light,
  and follow.

I ask them simply how it is they held their women
  when everything else they've touched
becomes dust.

MR BOOKS

Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.

Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.

Purchase Critics at Work.