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Michelle M. Tokarczyk has published one book of poetry, The House I'm Running From, and is a scholar of working-class studies and coeditor of Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory.
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Published Fall 2006
 
Lincoln Cabbies
When she gets stir crazy cooped
up in that rented room
a call to Capital Cab
gets her to the Gateway Mall.
Young Bobby (last week's driver),
Well, trouble drops on him like sunset.
Real estate broker till
the market dried up, lost his job,
his marriage (he didn't say about
the house and who'd ask).
He was real nice and friendly.
Over the depression, he says.
Making enough to pay the bills.
The middle-aged fellow yesterday
(What's his name?) had the family
farm till the 80's, then
agribusiness, interest rates,
all those things she doesn't understand.
Had to chop his land into little pieces.
Sold his sister a garden-size plot,
kept himself a tract and a trailer.
This is the way we live now.
Short rides we manage day to day.
Dreams wide as the town limit.
The sky still hangs big as ever
We just don't watch it so much. |
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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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