Subject

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.

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).

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