Selected by C. K. Williams as one of the five volumes published in 1991 in the National Poetry Series, The Surface was the first collection in Laura Mullen's acclaimed career.

The Surface: POEMS (National Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Mullen, Laura

History & Criticism

University of Illinois Press

Calvin Bedient calls the poetry in this volume "solid and brave and relentlessly inventive." Forrest Gander says, "The obsessive force of this poetry, ruptured by caesura and stanza, is remarkable. Despite the considerable intellectual torque, the poems, concerned always with identity, the borders of the I and the Here, are quite funny in passages. The drama of this work is gripping, convulsive, and intense."Subject holds the mirror up to language, attempting to find out (and find ways out of ) the limits of the wor(l)ds we are sentenced to. The lyric impulse exists, but the surface is rough, reflecting the violence of the effort to see into seeing itself: the voice is ragged, syntax is torn, words have been broken into syllable and sound, images dissolve, the page holds out alternate visions and versions (in double or triple columns), leaving any would-be univocal truth always in doubt.

Subject (New California Poetry)

United States

University of California Press

Calvin Bedient calls the poetry in this volume "solid and brave and relentlessly inventive." Forrest Gander says, "The obsessive force of this poetry, ruptured by caesura and stanza, is remarkable. Despite the considerable intellectual torque, the poems, concerned always with identity, the borders of the I and the Here, are quite funny in passages. The drama of this work is gripping, convulsive, and intense." Subject holds the mirror up to language, attempting to find out (and find ways out of ) the limits of the wor(l)ds we are sentenced to. The lyric impulse exists, but the surface is rough, reflecting the violence of the effort to see into seeing itself: the voice is ragged, syntax is torn, words have been broken into syllable and sound, images dissolve, the page holds out alternate visions and versions (in double or triple columns), leaving any would-be univocal truth always in doubt.

Subject (New California Poetry) (Volume 14)

Reference

Dark archive: The purpose of a dark archive is to function as a repository for information that can be used as a failsafe during disaster recovery.Laura Mullen’s fourth collection is a sequence of beautifully interrelated poems that explores how to accurately represent the reality of change and loss. Mullen pinpoints what is at stake: the possibility of communication and connection―and the hope of intimacy. Invoking Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” she pushes experiments in consciousness against their boundaries in an array of poetic forms. Poetic tropes are measured against natural phenomena as Mullen examines what “witness” might mean in the context of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the failures of capitalism to effect social justice, the murder of James Byrd in Texas, the personal loss of a mother figure, and a disintegrating love affair.

Dark Archive (New California Poetry) (Volume 32)

Poetry

This powerful collection of poems from Laura Mullen is the edgy, unashamedly experimental, and formally inventive book of a poet who has found her way to her own voice or style―or rather voices and styles, for there are several. The poems of After I Was Dead develop harmonically rather than melodically: they leap from one register, one voice, one tone to another in deft juxtapositions that carry narrative only incidentally, destabilizing traditional notions of development. These poems are honed by a fine intelligence into elegant, sometimes funny art, as in “Autumn”: “Her hair, brown. / Her specialty, damage. / Her specialty, becoming / Something else. Her hair, falling / Leaves, leaf rot, and then soil.” Through her rediscovery of the freedom Emily Dickinson located in being “dead” (in writing from over the border of an already recognized erasure), Mullen increases the territory of the contemporary poem.

After I Was Dead: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series)

Univ of Georgia Pr

This powerful collection of poems from Laura Mullen is the edgy, unashamedly experimental, and formally inventive book of a poet who has found her way to her own voice or style―or rather voices and styles, for there are several. The poems of After I Was Dead develop harmonically rather than melodically: they leap from one register, one voice, one tone to another in deft juxtapositions that carry narrative only incidentally, destabilizing traditional notions of development. These poems are honed by a fine intelligence into elegant, sometimes funny art, as in “Autumn”: “Her hair, brown. / Her specialty, damage. / Her specialty, becoming / Something else. Her hair, falling / Leaves, leaf rot, and then soil.” Through her rediscovery of the freedom Emily Dickinson located in being “dead” (in writing from over the border of an already recognized erasure), Mullen increases the territory of the contemporary poem.

After I Was Dead: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry)

University of Georgia Press

Fiction. Poetry. Laura Mullen's clever postmodern gothic is a tour de force. Here enter the stock elements of the generic horror tale: the haunted house, the doctor, the down-to-earth gardener, the chatty housemaid, the sunny morning and dark portentous night. At the center, a beautiful woman is dead. But is she? The tale is disassembled to offer alternate reading -- as a story, as a flipbook, and as a text scored for old and familiar voices. The ancient house the abandoned house the house that has been like that forever ... Dark shape in its bed of rank weeds its entrance gaping but not I was wrong like that/ Forever a shred of white lace at a broken window insisted on history.

The Tales of Horror: [A Flip-Book]

Kelsey Street Press

Poetry. Cross-Genre."Wildly absorbing, MURMUR is a gorgeous genre-bender: detective novel, film noir and memoir (and autopsy of all three), tricked out with bloody mirrors, blue murder, mutable coffins, loopy interrogations and a dead bombshell's shoes. This is one fabulous book!"—Rikki Ducornet "Laura Mullen floods the confines of the 'detective novel' with all possible events, all murderers and all murdered so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it. MURMUR is a further-fiction of displacement and testimony that calls us to the task of deciding not only whether we would or would not do a thing but also whether we even know the difference between the two. A gripping exploration into the brutality of our time that you will not soon forget."—Renee Gladman "MURMUR collects an astonishing array of sorties into language as a terra incognita occasioning the uncanny and always troubled confluence of the subject, the bodies it inhabits and the linguistic remainder. Mullen animates narrative at the level of its basic semantic pulse. You'll meet a talking corpse, a severed head, a heart drawn on an open palm and the gradual destruction of a face. Mullen is as much an expert in the comic and grotesque, as in the restless and anonymous. With a majestically controlled impatience she constructs a textual space both unnerving and familiar. These are splendid texts of the nameless ones (a 'messenger,' the 'caller,' the 'reader') who interrupt and witness the murmur of the linked deictic shadows of a recurring 'she' and 'he.' Never since Beckett has the unnamed been so chilling precisely because it is unnameable."—Steve McCaffery "Laura Mullen's MURMUR finds the crime in the moments between actions, in language overheard, doubling back, in a style both unnerving and comforting; always midsentence we feel death never dying, 'real despite or because of the staging,' and in the background, Duras, Hitchcock—the passions of mundane horrors always ready for our pleasure, discovery. MURMUR stays the mind like an unforgettable dream."—Thalia Field

Murmur

Futurepoem Books

Poetry. "From the internet, I learn that 'complicated grief' designates a bereavement disorder in which, instead of fading with time, the pain of loss remains as acute as it was in the beginning. But from Laura Mullen's book I learn that complicated grief also names something else: not a sufferer's excruciating condition, but a writer's exhilarating achievement. Here, the incapacity to move on from 'old' psychic scenarios has been itself complicated by a formidable prose that not only refuses to get over them but even works to revive them in all their undying (Mullen would say: undead) vigor. To these unstintingly reimagined ancient histories—ranging from fairy tale and yesteryear's news item to childhood trauma and grownup broken heart—Mullen gives all the hyperrealist precision of a dream: every turn and phrase starts at you. And not the least of this book's disconcerting, but strangely salutary, powers is that, under its stimulus, you can't help starting back."—D.A. Miller In a way (the way I'm taking it) Laura Mullen's COMPLICATED GRIEF follows (with giant dropouts) everything she knows about being a monster. Her aegis covers women (young ones and aging), un-natural disasters and literature. If something packed could wander like Julianne Moore's mind, to the benefit of everyone, but more like a whole department store or a library feeling snarky, shuffled itself and somehow it was wise.—Eileen Myles One of the deep pleasures of this book is to be in the presence of a mind fully alive to the contradictions of what it is to be a sentient being, thinking and feeling while simultaneously thinking of feeling. I found myself marveling word-by-word, page after page. One thought: How often are we offered the opportunity to watch a mind form the mental construct we call "a thought," and why is it so rare? The world is here, seeping brilliantly through the seams, made utterly new.—Nick Flynn

Complicated Grief

Solid Objects

Poetry. Taking—and twisting—the title of an Iraq operation for its own, Laura Mullen's seventh book might be summed up in the phrase André Breton famously applied to Frieda Kahlo: "a bomb with a ribbon around it." An extraordinarily comprehensive, sympathetic and scathing, catalog of brides, this collection of poems is also an examination of the emotional costs of a sustained attention to party planning in the face of an almost invisible war. Influenced equally by Italo Calvino and Martha Stewart, playing with conceptual poetry as well as Romance clichés, Mullen's poetic environment, and the language that sustains it, is as remarkable as it is disquieting. "ENDURING FREEDOM [is] a galloping great read, a page-turner, and dazzles with linguistic mischief and wit.... I already wanted to buy it for a friend. I am thrilled by it."—Hazel White

Enduring Freedom

Otis Books | Seismicity Editions

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