Matthew Olzmann was a 2006 and 2007 Kundiman Fellow. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Hanging Loose, Pebble Lake Review and elsewhere.

The Feral Issue

ns 73-74 | Fall 2009/Spring 2010

The "Feral Issue" presents work by a range of people, from those who have been doing animal studies all along to those newly exploring the field. If it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world. We hope that the writing here will give our readers a sense of what animal studies is and where it's going, and also add some new voices to its course.

Read this Issue

Published Spring/Summer 2008

By 2020, Scientists Predict the Earth's Waters to Rise 10%

by Matthew Olzmann | ns 70

Because he wanted to keep the North Pole
from melting and delay the end
of Earth, the President sent one million
citizens to the top of the world with paper fans.
When that didn't work, he sent another million.
That failing, he sent the rest of us.
There we were, working in shifts, fanning
the continent of ice until our arms expired.
Because our joints were killing us, we built
contraptions that fanned the mountains of frost for us.
Because we were sleepy, we opened
a coffee shop. Because we were hungry—
a taco stand. And although the glacier
continued to melt, we found ourselves
saying, Damn this place is cold.
Because of the cold, we built a space heater
the size of Texas. Six of them
and a generator. A drive-in movie theater.
A roller rink that played eighties music.
And because this was good, we drank
a whole lot of beer. And because our shoes
kept getting wet, we ordered orange life-vests—
millions of them, now floating everywhere.

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.