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David Dodd Lee is the author of four books of poems, including Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002) and Abrupt Rural (New Issues, 2004). He teaches at Indiana University South Bend.
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Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Turning Seventeen
(Muskegon, 1976)
by David Dodd Lee | ns 69
The mist off the river mixed with the smoke
And made the wine glow.
Her fingers were soft. They jumped at the tops of my thighs.
An animal lingered in its cave behind me.
A red slab of meat sighed
Coming out of its plastic, and I seared it.
Big Midwest machinery under a volcano, sky bothered
By chemical rain in rural Muskegon care of outlying Chicago ...
A house-sized generator hummed on the bank
Of the Muskegon River 18 miles upstream, sweet for its duet with
razor wire.
A moment stood up then.
We were bright against the birch trees.
Our utensils clinked, bright before the birch trees.
Industry haloed by woods,
Creamed corn used as chum in the water, soapy as factory discharge.
Like smashed plates, the broken slag,
In these shadows of gulls and homeless women and children.
At dusk even the salmon grew ravenous in the super-heated river.
Bruised, festered, eyeless—faces blown half off.
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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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