Dark Archive
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Great losses define this big, challenging fourth collection from Mullen (After I Was Dead). There is the damage to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and the loss of Mullen's stepmother, a painter who died on a wilderness trek. Against these losses Mullen sets a brace of quotations and a bevy of clouds: poems called "Love (Stratus)," "Cloud Seeding: From a Journal," and "Stratocumulus" suggest the way she contemplates the sky, while quotation, in poem after poem, from William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" appears to ask whether old ways of writing can ever keep up with current grief. Mullen's self-aware, self-descriptive, abstract forms answer that last question with a no. Mullen must instead try very hard to make her texts new by making them self-conscious. Hence she offers multipage works that look half-erased or half-written, stanzaic poems whose traditional appearance belies their self-consuming angst ("The author is not lonely as a cad"), and prose poems that muse on the "Endless necessity of finding new words for exactly that shade and shape of nervous anger, that deflection of interest which, increasing, allows one to walk out... no disaster, just a failure to be there for each other, to be there."
