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Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge
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Product Description
so I could write a book
then you could look me up
in your voluminous recyclopedia
—from Muse & Drudge
Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen’s career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #306160 in Books
- Published on: 2006-10-31
- Released on: 2006-10-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 176 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Mullen's avant-garde word games, applied to the marrow of African-American experience, rightly won plaudits for Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002): poets and critics alert to innovation knew about Mullen a decade earlier, when three small-press volumes put her on the map. The contents of all three reappear in this collection, along with a brief new preface from Mullen. The first two (as she explains) build on Gertrude Stein's great modernist prose poems, full of non sequiturs and sexual puns, to make language undermine racist clichés: "The color 'nude,' a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan. Shelf life of stacked goods." The slightly longer paragraphs of the second volume (whose title means both "supermarket" and "sperm kit") are more complicated and self-conscious: "So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant. Devoid of colored labels, the discounted irregulars." The ambitious if sometimes scattered Muse & Drudge abandons prose poetry for long chains of irregularly rhymed quatrains, taking on politics, poetics and history: "how a border orders disorder/ how the children looked/ whose mothers worked/ in the maquiladora." Linguistic experiment has rarely sounded so bluesy and cool. (Nov.)
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Review
Readers can track the evolving process of this poet's craft. And it is an evolution. -- Library Journal
Recyclopedia [points to the] . . . simultaneity of language, a replicable and mutable Big Bang of thematic, linguistic, syntactic, and formal combination. -- Boston Review
[Mullen is] at play but refusing to be played, Sappho and "juicy fruit" [fall] into [one] poem without pastiche, anachronis[m]. -- Bookforum
Review
“In her previous four collections, Harryette Mullen’s influences have ranged from language poetry to the rhythms and playfulness of the black vernacular . . . Suffused with both politics and literary theory, Mullen’s language refuses to be weighed down by either.” —The New York Times Book Review
Customer Reviews
spirals and kinky quatrains
Mullen's three book collection is vertiginous and virtuosic. Her punning and homophonic-connotative cleverness which stacks her poems into multi-valenced spinning tops dizzies one's head with cloudy turbulence. She should be written multiple "wolf tickets" for speeding. If you don't appreciate this book on a first read, please revisit it at a later date.
Recycle this book!!
Share this book with your poet-friends, family, random people you meet on the street. Avant-Garde poetry at its best. This book is changing my life. Harryette Mullen is brilliant and inspiring!
