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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).
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Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Target Practice
by Carrie Shipers | ns 71-72
Opening day of deer season, my uncle aimed
his new gun. I rolled my eyes, stuck out
my tongue. He cocked his finger, knocking over
beer cans stacked at his elbow. Go to bed,
my mother said. It was barely dark,
even for November. Let me see that rifle,
my father said. He didn't hunt and kept no guns.
I heard him click the safety on. Later,
my parents fought. He drinks too much.
She could have died. My father answered,
It's over now. She said, I thought if you
quit drinking we'd have peace. I forgot
your family, too. When my uncle came
for his gun, she met him in the street. I saw
her hands shove the gun in his open window,
point to the road, protect what was hers.
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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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