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Kevin A. González is a fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poems and stories appear in Playboy, McSweeney's, Poetry, The Progressive, and Virginia Quarterly Review. |
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Published Spring 2006
 
Flat American Waltz
These hard plastic seats are taking us
into the black air. Let's all believe in the place
where the black smoke of the bus assimilates,
curling up, each strand a question mark.
Let's talk about accents, tongues
isolated. In any diner of the world,
I know the scent of the streets of Madison.
We might as well be wearing blindfolds
for America. Everything has been said.
The best metaphor I could conjure:
a man muttering a cliche as deep
as the thin lines of the sidewalk,
where a school of cigarette butts gathers
beneath the cracked roof of the bus shelter.
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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.
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