Judith Slater's poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poet Lore, Chautauqua Literary Journal, AGNIonline, and elsewhere. She lives in Buffalo where she is a psychologist in private practice.

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

First Seduction

by Judith Slater | ns 70

Seven and in love for life with my uncle
at the wheel of a Ford convertible—
sun glasses, slicked-back hair, movie star profile.

We've dropped off my aunt to shop for nylons
and are traveling at a speed that would
horrify my parents. He's teasing me,

bets me 50 cents he knows the color
of my underpants. "They're shocking pink,"
he shouts into the wind.

I raise my riffling skirt.
"They're white," I yell triumphantly.
"I lose," his profile grins. "I'll buy ice cream."

At a picnic table beside Chautauqua Lake,
I try to engage him with stories
about my school, but his veiled eyes

look across the lake to the casino
where every weekend he and my aunt
drink and dance and celebrate the end of war.

"They will ruin themselves," my mother says.
And they do.
For the rest of my life, I'll fall for men in profile.

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.