Michael Thurston is Associate Professor of English at Smith College. A student of Cary Nelson, Thurston formerly taught at Yale University and is one of the leading young critics of modern American poetry. He is the author of Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars (UNC Press, 2001), and of essays on Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Lowell, Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, and Ernest Hemingway. He is the editor of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital, a collection of essays on modern American culture (NYU Press, 2001), and his reviews of contemporary poetry have appeared in Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere.