Calvin Bedient calls the poetry in this volume "solid and brave and relentlessly inventive." Forrest Gander says, "The obsessive force of this poetry, ruptured by caesura and stanza, is remarkable. Despite the considerable intellectual torque, the poems, concerned always with identity, the borders of the I and the Here, are quite funny in passages. The drama of this work is gripping, convulsive, and intense."

Subject holds the mirror up to language, attempting to find out (and find ways out of ) the limits of the wor(l)ds we are sentenced to. The lyric impulse exists, but the surface is rough, reflecting the violence of the effort to see into seeing itself: the voice is ragged, syntax is torn, words have been broken into syllable and sound, images dissolve, the page holds out alternate visions and versions (in double or triple columns), leaving any would-be univocal truth always in doubt.

Acknowledgments

Wake
Circles
Apropos
Late & Soon
Gift
Frames
Lying in It
Model Train
Glaces à Répétition
Refuge
Tune
Intention Tremor
Three Arrangement
Flowers Formed of Needles
Plans
Story for Reproduction
Shock Context
Postures
The Squeaky Wheel
Circles
Cataract
Translation Series
Old Pond
Arose (Read As) A
Sound
Subject Matter
Empty
White Devices
Applications Of
(Among) The Accomplice's Accomplishments
Railroad History (Practice Text)
See
Assembly
The Distance (This)

Context & Subtexts

Laura Mullen teaches at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Her first collection of poems, The Surface (1991), was chosen as a National Poetry Series selection; her second collection, After I Was Dead (1999), was selected for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also the author of The Tales of Horror (Kelsey Street Press, 1999).

“Compelling”—Julie Reid, Poetry Project Newsletter

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

"To write today in English means using an idiom that is hegemonic, 'globalized,' no longer national. Vacated. A human, though, is necessarily sited, and here we find Mullen's Subject. Its movement open to both '(gone) and suture,' it grasps an anxiety in American speech too often covered over by Americans, though it's visible in the world. To cite Agamben: 'the ethical subject is a subject that bears witness to a desubjectivization.' Mullen's 'subject' is not one of triumphalism; it articulates the 'no-one,' ninguén, the 'not-even-who' that generates being's fibre, its viscosity, presence. In Mullen, 'Belonging to a body/To itself unrecognizable' is followed by 'Open the doors. Here.' Her 'here' is poetry that American English needs."—Erin Mouré

Visit Laura Mullen's website