Dark Archive - (New California Poetry) by Laura Mullen (Paperback)

About the Book

"You know you can't right the disaster, or even write the disaster, but now you know, in reading "Dark Archive, " that you can ride the evanescence that comes before and after. Mullen's shapes shift, disappear like the living but remain like lives, as sharp curved traces, jarred angles of incidence/vantage/glance. See how veer, wander, being dragged, suffering restructuring, turn into new solids, solidarities of moving, hard-edged lyric social work in solitude, for the crowd, against loneliness, which is really, really cool."
--Fred Moten, author of "Hughson's Tavern"

Praise for Subject:
"Compelling."
Julie Reid, Poetry Project Newsletter

"Subject limns the rough and ragged borders of identity. It needles though traditional ideas of what occurs within self and outside of (without) self."
Geoffrey Goodwin, Spider Words Magazine

Praise for After I Was Dead:
"A powerful reconstruction of self. . .. Wildly versatile formally, restlessly roving from verse to prose to epistle and back. Taken collectively it reads as resistance of structures."
Sam White, Boston Review

The poems in After I Was Dead expose language where it is most vulnerable, most likely to fail: in the abstract diction of human speech. The voice feels actual, audible."
Kim Fortier, Rain Taxi

"Despite the reassurances of our good looks with which lesser poets woo us, we are not so dead that we do not respond with a kind of happiness to this unexpected demonstration that truth really is beauty."
Christopher Davis, The Journal

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"You know you can't right the disaster, or even write the disaster, but now you know, in reading Dark Archive, that you can ride the evanescence that comes before and after. Mullen's shapes shift, disappear like the living but remain like lives, as sharp curved traces, jarred angles of incidence/vantage/glance. See how veer, wander, being dragged, suffering restructuring, turn into new solids, solidarities of moving, hard-edged lyric social work in solitude, for the crowd, against loneliness, which is really, really cool."

--Fred Moten, author of Hughson's Tavern



Praise for Subject:

"Compelling."

Julie Reid, Poetry Project Newsletter



"Subject limns the rough and ragged borders of identity. It needles though traditional ideas of what occurs within self and outside of (without) self."

Geoffrey Goodwin, Spider Words Magazine





Praise for After I Was Dead:

"A powerful reconstruction of self.... Wildly versatile formally, restlessly roving from verse to prose to epistle and back. Taken collectively it reads as resistance of structures."

Sam White, Boston Review



The poems in After I Was Dead expose language where it is most vulnerable, most likely to fail: in the abstract diction of human speech. The voice feels actual, audible."

Kim Fortier, Rain Taxi



"Despite the reassurances of our good looks with which lesser poets woo us, we are not so dead that we do not respond with a kind of happiness to this unexpected demonstration that truth really is beauty."

Christopher Davis, The Journal

Review Quotes

"A strong collection of poetry."--Greg Langley "Baton Rouge Advocate" (6/12/2011 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Laura Mullen's first collection of poems, The Surface, was chosen as a National Poetry Series selection; her second collection, After I Was Dead, was selected for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also the author of Subject (UC Press), and two hybrid texts: The Tales of Horror and Murmur.