The Midwest Quarterly articles from September 1999

The Midwest Quarterly archives from September 1999

Of Woman Bondage: The Eroticism of Feet in the House on Mango Street
September 22, 1999... High heels must have been a man's idea--"Their asses will look good and they'll be crippled!"--Rick Overton, Comic Strip Live, 1991) AS A LITERARY SCHOLAR, I am embarrassed to admit that I was well into my graduate career before I thought to...

Dodsworth's Revelation: Motoring toward Self
September 22, 1999... SAM DODSWORTH TRAVELS from his midwestern Zenith to the major cities of Europe in cars, on trains, on ocean steamers, and even on an airplane. However, to say that Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth is a novel about travel is as gross an understatement...

From Feeling to Form: Image as Translation in the Poetry of Charles Wright
September 22, 1999... PERHAPS FIRST AMONG the handful of projects available to the lyric poet is the effort to uncover and bring to light that which usually remains dark or unformed in our passing experience, to bring into language the feel of life. This project...

SELFISHNESS.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... I could sit on this pond rock for as long as it takes to fly to New York. But is there a need for so much greed? These sun-warmed raccoon bones, polished by birds and animals feeding, then washed to...

TO MY FATHER.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... I think of you bent over unlaced shoes looking for your name over a desert of daydreams. Daily you devour the distance you become. "Dead, dead, dead, I'm dead," you said, humbled by glasswired windows ...

RANTINGS.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Everyday I run away from home past the whispers of trees toward the sky not fast, more like the shagging gait of a fat dog A waxing gibbous casually climbing the hill so as not to...

A HAWK & THE UNCONTAMINATED SOUL.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... The other day there was this hawk (Mahler's hawk) perched upon the brushed aluminum of a street lamp. It is not there today. Only a few feet away, however, sits another hawk (or the same one) upon the bare...

PLUCK.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Oh, man, the past is a long and twisty word! What word, the one just on the tip of my tongue? The one I've been moving down for years, shaking hands with the rain? I want to wear the color my life is, but it keeps...

VENETIAN BLINDS.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... I like the way light binds the skin, makes a bird cage of the body. The stripped neck patches of the common loon, the sooty shearwater's pleated wing. I raise my arms, bound at the wrist, breasts float the dark...

WHY WE PLAN TO MOVE.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... To give us credit, we never imagined two neighbors with backhoes. Neighbor One "landscapes" by levering out his trees. Neighbor Two plows under the so-called "trash trees" and shrubs to "discourage termites."...

WINDOW SEAT.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Two hang-ups in one morning: Rings. Answer. Then alert silence: someone saying nothing. The bodies of the hills spread before me. Fog holds high above them. Flocks of starlings rise and settle. Last night ...

ADMITTING FINALLY.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... fold your heart's fevered petals one smooth tongue over the other put it to bed in a strong box let the key fall through your awkward fingers down into the blonde fringed mouth of a sleeping ditch get in your...

RITUAL.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... we will call him delicate-bird-trapped- in-stone pale-flower-frozen- in-the-mammoth's-belly we will scratch his image immature into the ice sheeting our once fertile plain we will make a basket of our hands ...

IN THE KITCHEN.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... "How can you question the planets? Have you ever seen what the moon does to the tides?" She tastes salt upon her lips, a white expanse of sea and sky fills the cramped and tiny kitchen. Cool linoleum gives way to...

A TIME OF FORGIVENESS.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Arms cannot reach the sun, the body transcended, the night borne into sleep or distance, arms cannot bear away the suffering conceal the weight at dawn soothe and flatten the crest of pain, wearing the rain invisible...

AROUND EACH AND EVERY.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... They flitter constantly, in and out, biding and restless, thousands of them, dark rustlings and furies like migrations of winter waxwings settling in forest treetops. And they dive and skim over shifting planes,...

TING TING.(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... --from The Timekeepers Dictionary of Acoustics the slint of aborted rain ceasing on the flagstone step the dark of light at the water spider's toes as it swings sunward cracked corn, split pea no and...

HERE IN THE MOUNTAINS(1).(Brief Article)(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Here in the mountains, we remember there are answers that do not reach us in the city. Messages of wind, handed down from leaf to leaf across the hills of the elders; messages that die crossing the rivers of...

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: National Narrative as a Liminal Voice
September 22, 1999... Most of us nowadays are sick. (East, West, 87) SALMAN RUSHDIE'S Midnight's Children is the long, sometimes inspiring, often tragic story of Saleem Sinai, a Moslem Indian, born on the stroke of midnight, at the very moment of his country's...

Significant Stereotypes in Hurston's "Conscience of the Court"
September 22, 1999... ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S "Conscience of the Court," originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in March of 1950, is a little-known and rarely discussed story. Considering the recent attention to Hurston's importance in the development of...

Liberal Learning Needs a New Public Relations Campaign
September 22, 1999... Bernard graduated from college several years ago. He studied hard and earned honors. He has a good job and a comfortable existence. At a family get-together his father mentions a newspaper editorial that says the U.S. should reassert the Monroe...

Anne-Marie Smith. A Forced Agreement: Press Acquiescence to Censorship in Brazil.
September 22, 1999... Anne-Marie Smith. A Forced Agreement: Press Acquiescence to Censorship in Brazil. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997, vi+231 pp, cloth $45, paper $19.95. Brazil's press and especially the Press Association have often...