David Salner has worked as a furnace tender, iron ore miner, and machinist. His poetry has appeared in Threepenny Review and Prairie Schooner, and his most recent book is Mug Shots (March Street).

ns 69 | Fall/Winter 2007

Featuring an interview with MH Abrams, reviews of new books by Walter Benn Michaels, John McGowan, and Paul Smith, plus a special section on online criticism.

Read this Issue

Published Winter 2005

Furnace Tenders at Dawn

by David Salner | ns 63-64

He slumps on a pile of scrap—his wrinkles
glowing pink through a varnish of black sweat—
and pitches one shoulder against the scorched wall, as if
he were holding and being held up. The air breaks open—
sun spreads through the dust. His partner walks out
and hears the older man's breath, the sifting sound
of air in charred lungs, and drops his hands,
carbon-black, to a spot on the older man’s back.
His thumbs press circles beside the neck
as he works at the muscles, as if they were machines
that needed shut down at the end of the shift. The hands
work the fiery demons out, the shift after shift,
the rumble of the furnace, the jab of the oxygen lance,
the blast, and the baking heat on his skin
as he opens the door on the yellow-white steel—
and it grips him again in that fiery room. It's as if
he were that boy, thirty years ago, who felt so unfit
for the work he's done ever since. The hands,
working overtime now, push the demons out—
the chrome, the iron, the heat after heat—
and the muscles relax. And the muscles relax
like machines that were hard to shut down
at the end of the shift. There's a joke, a gesture,
and both of them laugh. They toss
lunch boxes into their cars and drive off.

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.