Mike White is a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Utah and serves as the poetry editor for Quarterly West. His recent work has appeared in journals including Poetry, Margie, Fulcrum, The Antioch Review, and The Iowa Review.

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.

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Published Spring 2006

Mint Condition

by Mike White | ns 65-66

my memory
of that postage stamp
and its tiny

blue-coated soldier
propped stiffly
against a big flowering tree

musket lying still
at his side and useless
the left leg

ending in gory bandages
where the knee
should rightly be

my little finger
probing and
probing that raw

place where the knee
anybody's knee
ought to be

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.