 |
Carrie Shipers' poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Barrow Street, Hayden's Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals, and she is the author of two chapbooks, Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream, 2008).
|
 |
|
 |
Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
War Stories
by Carrie Shipers | ns 71-72
Days, in the factory that killed his father,
he blocked caps with crooked fingers, knuckles
smashed flat or ridged from being broken.
Nights, he drank and watched the news.
When I studied the war in school, I asked
my mother why he didn't go. He hurt his knee.
By the time it healed, we had three kids.
I wanted a father who carried a gun,
who wasn't afraid to die. She said, Even if
he lived, it would've killed him. He doesn't talk
about the war he didn't fight. I used to yell
so much, he says. I don't know why. Without
the war, I can't explain his drinking, the rage
he lost as he got older, the awful tenderness
my mother tends. When she serves pork chops,
she cuts meat from bones she buries
in the trash. When my father's called to table,
he pretends not to know what she's done.
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
