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Tam Lin Neville's poems have been published in Harvard Review, Mademoiselle, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her book of poems, Journey Cake, was published by BkMk Press. She is an editor of Off The Grid Press, a new press that publishes books of poetry by people over sixty.
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Published Spring 2007
 
Black Out
For the neighbors across the way
it's just another reason
to get drunk, down the beer
before it gets warm in this strange heat
that burns through our houses
and our clothes. They
pop tops and laugh,
drowning out the darkness.
When the towers fell,
when the last war started,
they were out drinking, shouting,
shooting firecrackers at the sky.
Tonight it's just heat
staggering down the block,
maples and their leaves,
as still as stone. My neighbor's house
is black with tar paper,
grass stripped down to dirt,
a place to wash cars in the mud.
The yard's a hive of grown sons and daughters
pushing and pulling their kids,
faces shiny with sweat.
Firecrackers have crazed the dogs
who've escaped to the street.
The mother belts out
Get back here you fuckers.
(They slink back to her rough caress.)
The father's already too drunk to stand—
Why not choose this for a holiday?
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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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