EtC explores contemporary American selfhood, socially mediated and economically motivated, within a system where we learn to see and represent ourselves as one marketable image among many, where "brand" displaces character, and the corporal and corporate intersect. Elsie is both a collection of tropes for femininity (her embodied history leaning heavily into illness and inadequacy when not floating on fantasies of power) and also a symptom of her country's illness. Almost constantly laughing, she is--obviously--unreliable. But EtC blends persona into hyper-confessionalism to open a space for honesty--the hope is that the spectacle of Elsie exercising her fraught and limited freedoms in the context of cultural, social, and environmental disasters might provide a point of critique, in order to readjust the values shaping our experience so as to move toward ways of being in the world that might be wiser, kinder, more sane, and more real.
"Our history begins with the present, a gap, 'the "spread,"' the gate that won't fully shut. The lacuna isn't to be filled with presence but lets rage sing the poems in EtC. Laura Mullen plays with citation and reliability, with versions of history and memory, and with the libidinal energy of remembering not encased in individual experience but residing in language: our Cow [Memory] Palace. 'Milk milk milk milkmilkmilk.' Or, simply: 'eeeeeee.' With vocal cords opened by a cry of vowels--that phoneme that most directly reaches the gods--Mullen releases poems that embody the poem's more impossible forms and functions."--Kimberly Alidio
"Laura Mullen's EtC is a furiously, gloriously comic jeremiad amid the darkness that envelops American society. This is a book that refuses to behave as it turns from comedy to lament and from lament to frustration. With lines torqued like a bow, these poems are arrows of social resistance."--Charles Bernstein
"Astounding leaps of imagination. These poems will change your mind."--Toi Derricotte
"At a time when the US Empire's salvage operations are acting out through battered cultural landscapes, there's a paucity of poets able to detect (let alone withstand) Empire's covert inducements in their own writing. Laura Mullen is not only one of the best decoders of ideological traps that I know of but also a master creator of liminal subjectivities that are already imagining alternate futures. In EtC, the surveillance mechanisms of gender, sex, corporate power, and militarism are deftly identified and outmaneuvered via Mullen's passionate genre-edging poetics."--Rodrigo Toscano
Poetry.
Laura Mullen has been a MacDowell and Karolyi Foundation Fellow, a featured poet at the International Poetry Festival in Taipei, a Rona Jaffe Award recipient, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. She holds degrees from the University of Iowa and U.C. Berkeley. Her poetry has been anthologized in collections from Norton, Wesleyan, and elsewhere; recent work has appeared in the Harvard Review, Court Green, the Bennington Review, Diagram, and the Georgia Review. Mullen's first book, The Surface, was a National Poetry Series selection, and her subsequent poetry collections and hybrid-genre works have been published by the University of California Press, FuturePoem, and Otis / Seismicity, among other presses. A CD of Jason Eckardt's setting of her poem "The Distance (This)" is available from Mode records. Her collaboration with composer Nathan Davis―"a Sound uttered, a Silence crossed"―had its premiere in La Jolla, and has been performed at Notre Dame and Williams College. A collaboration (Verge) with John David O'Brien was published in 2017, and her translation of Veronique Pittolo's Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. Solid Objects published her ninth collection, EtC, in fall 2023.
