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Tom Wayman's newest book of poems is High Speed Through Shoaling Water (2007). He teaches at the University of Calgary, Alberta, and served as the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University in winter 2007. His first collection of short fiction, Boundary Country, is scheduled to appear in 2007.
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Published Spring 2007
 
Employment Application
Mountains fill my eyes
The lift of a slope of evergreens
interrupted by a grey cliff that
the verdant flow encircles
and rises past
as, down here, I inhale
the sour odor of
rain on dry asphalt
—a scent dense as a mown hayfield's
Five months in an auto parts warehouse, three
in a tire dealership, six weeks on a roadside
brushing contract
Also shoulder bottle and can collecting, and, yes
asking for gas money in a parking lot
A week driving tractor with a bailer
Such hours, days are my prisons
But my work is
hauling in vistas of
heavy white mist that blurs the summits
—a cloud whose trailing tattered edges
mean rain on the forest uplands
and snow, this season, in the highest passes
where I cross a ridge and descend
toward Spring, slabs of stone in the cuts
topped with caps of moss
This land so huge
one can never see enough of it
New colts shadowing the mares
in the greening pasture
Calves among the herd that stands
between unmelted drifts on a hillside
Three months in cab trim, a day
as a barista, most of a course in
small engine repair, laborer
on a cement crew |
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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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