Mortar - Softcover

Mumolo, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890650900 ISBN 13: 9781890650902

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2013

Synopsis

Uneasy and vigilantly aware of the mire of awareness, these poems wrest from daily encounters of city life a contentious consciousness that can open, albeit explosively to each next instant. Just as the title connotes both the short smoothbore gun used by the military to wreak havoc and the organic material made from cement, sand, lime, and water that bonds the bricks of a cityscape together, this collection of poetry offers both the emergency of society’s destructive failings and the sometimes vexed sometimes confoundingly transformative emergence of intimacy between self and other. The fragments that construct these poems court grammar and turn from it, their slipperiness befits both the anxiety and ambivalence— the pleasure and the trap—of attempting to name the known, the knowable, and then to find oneself snared in the constructs that such knowing compels one to inhabit.

About this title

About the Author:

Sara Mumolo is a poet whose work has appeared in 1913: A Journal of Forms, Berkeley Poetry Review, Eleven Eleven, Volt, and West Wind Review, among others. She is the program manager for the MFA program in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, the coeditor of the chapbook series Calaveras, and a poetry editor at Omnidawn. Her work Mortar was a finalist for the 1913 First Book Prize. She lives in Oakland, California.

Review:

Sara Mumolo’s Mortar strips the “flexible architecture of belonging” of its democratic sentimentality. By examining the ideology of their own careful phrasing, her poems reveal and revel in what it means for a citizen to belong simultaneously to a plurality of subject positions and symbolic systems. The surreal intersections of gender, nation, class, language and genre become, in her work, “an activity/not an image,” a subversive motile language that dares to “disarm the most comfortable beliefs” and critique “how the bourgeoisie believed in Desire.” With wry feminist humor and not a little ambivalence, her poems document the psychic costs of an economy that conflates sex and capital, the female nude and the courtesan. “Rolling over onto backs, we’re conflict’s mascot,” Mumolo bravely writes, “none of these anxieties are new.” Dear wise and foolish virgins of late, late capitalism: this book is for you. (Brian Teare, Author of Companion Grasses)

Sara Mumolo’s MORTAR is a book of action and reflection, of succinct dramatic moments. Forgetting and remembering, the saint of translation, “St Jerome climbs out of his pictures.” The easy, lilting physical and metaphysical figures radiate a painterly, storybook quality that messes with the concision of Mumolo’s diction, her unexpected puns. In MORTAR, the “fragile achievements of uncertainty” – the certainty of uncertainty – is imagined amidst the natural world and worlds of human construction, the “bouquets of buildings.” This book is a clarifying encounter. (Norma Cole, Author of To Be At Music)

About this edition

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1890650900
• ISBN 13: 9781890650902
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80