Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge - Softcover

Mullen, Harryette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974562 ISBN 13: 9781555974565

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2006

Synopsis

Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary


if you turned down the media
so I could write a book
then you could look me up
in your voluminous recyclopedia
-from Muse & Drudge

Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.

About this title

About the Author

HARRYETTE MULLEN teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Reviews

Mullen's avant-garde word games, applied to the marrow of African-American experience, rightly won plaudits for Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002): poets and critics alert to innovation knew about Mullen a decade earlier, when three small-press volumes put her on the map. The contents of all three reappear in this collection, along with a brief new preface from Mullen. The first two (as she explains) build on Gertrude Stein's great modernist prose poems, full of non sequiturs and sexual puns, to make language undermine racist clichés: "The color 'nude,' a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan. Shelf life of stacked goods." The slightly longer paragraphs of the second volume (whose title means both "supermarket" and "sperm kit") are more complicated and self-conscious: "So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant. Devoid of colored labels, the discounted irregulars." The ambitious if sometimes scattered Muse & Drudge abandons prose poetry for long chains of irregularly rhymed quatrains, taking on politics, poetics and history: "how a border orders disorder/ how the children looked/ whose mothers worked/ in the maquiladora." Linguistic experiment has rarely sounded so bluesy and cool. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555974562
• ISBN 13: 9781555974565
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176