Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge
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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 & DrudgeRecyclopedia 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.Publishers WeeklyMullen'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 clich s: "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 2006 Reed Business Information.
