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.
Dark Archive
About the Book
Reviews
“A strong collection of poetry. . . . Mullen’s poetry is not for the faint-hearted. You need to be committed to reading poetry, not afraid of the challenge. But if you do the work, the return on your effort is huge.”—Greg Langley Baton Rouge Advocate“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
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
Table of Contents
System
Acknowledgments
Cloud Cover
window/ candle
No Voice
In the Space between Words Begin
Remediation Attempt
I Wandered Networks like a Cloud
The Author Is Not
I Wandered (Phony) As
By and By
Little Landscape
I Wandered Her Voice
The Proofs Arrive
As
Stratocumulus
Prose Poem
White Box
Original Material
Studying Clouds (A Trick of the Light)
Parts of Speech
Sound Barrier
Cloud as Lonely
Images, Similes, Some Alliteration
Collide and Coalesce
Code
The White Box of Mirror Dissolved Is Not Singular
Passages
Turn
If
TURN
OWN STRING
A POOL POOLS
IN YOU INSIDE
WREST WORD CLOUD
NO ON COINAGE
EX SELF
EXPANSION EXPANSION
WILDERNESS HERE MATTER
EAST LAST
TRUTH HOUSE MATERIALS PUBLICITY
TRUTH END
POLIS IS SPACE
SAME SAME
NAME CRIME
EXAMPLE AMERICA
INTERPRETING TURNING THINGS
UTTER UTTERLY
Troposphere
Pass
Cloud Seeding: From a Journal
The Visual World behind My Head
Virga
Orographic
(Stratus) Endlessness
Cloud Money
Message
Daisies
On a Clear Day
Love (Stratus)
Love (Stratus Opacus)
Love (Opacus)
Love (Scud)
Edge of There
Love (Altocumulus Translucidus & Altostratus Opacus)
Desire
(Pieces from the Broken Roof of an Abandoned Passage)
After-Image (Louisiana Company)
Spoke of a Blueprint
Should Have Ended
The Motif Modifies Space
Even in My Dreams the Knowledge
Ghost Mist
Evaporation / Condensation