Laura Mullen's writing is
alive to the shared work of meaning-making and attentive to the unseen and unsaid. "Mullen's shapes shift, disappear like the living but remain like lives...turn into new solids, solidarities of moving, hard-edged lyric social work...against loneliness…" (Fred Moten) "Mullen sets up a site of fluid exchange between text and reader, an inter-subjective process that inflects affective communication with a subversive sense of contingency..." (Amy Moorman Robbins) A MacDowell and Karolyi Foundation Fellow, a featured poet at the International Poetry Festival in Taipei, a Rona Jaffe Award recipient and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Mullen holds degrees from the University of Iowa and U.C. Berkeley. Find Mullen's recent work in Posit 41 and On Occasion: Poetry for the People (Coach House), look out for poems in The Tiny and nonfiction in Agni. Her first book, The Surface, was a National Poetry Series selection, and her subsequent poetry collections and hybrid-genre works have been published by the University of California Press, Future Poem, and Otis / Seismicity among other presses: her ninth collection, EtC, was published by Solid Objects in 2023. A CD of Jason Eckardt's setting of her poem "Undersong" is available from Mode records. Her collaboration with composer Nathan Davis—"a Sound uttered, a Silence crossed"—had its premiere in La Jolla, and has been performed at Notre Dame and Williams College. A collaboration (Verge) with the artist John David O'Brien is available, and her translation of Veronique Pittolo's Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2018. Her 9th book, Find a recent selection of poems at POSIT 41 & the pandemic issue of ANGLES. Read her translation of Stephanie Chaillou's first book, published by Lavender Ink / Dialogos.
Available through Black Square Editions
EtC reviewed by Cary Stough...
4 Poems, including:
WHAT IF POETRY WASN'T
A song or a saying
But a pause in the effort
To hold a tune or
Communicate look
Here is a dead moth
Lying in the skeletal
Structure of a dried leaf
Trace the lace of the stuff
The impulse of life
Once traveled through
The trajectory
A sort of ocarina
Open to soundless
Breath
Moving Poems