Synopses & Reviews
Uneasy and vigilantly aware of the mire of awareness, these poems wrest from daily encounters of city life a contentious consciousness that can open, albeit explosively to each next instant. Just as the title connotes both the short smoothbore gun used by the military to wreak havoc and the organic material made from cement, sand, lime, and water that bonds the bricks of a cityscape together, this collection of poetry offers both the emergency of societys destructive failings and the sometimes vexed sometimes confoundingly transformative emergence of intimacy between self and other. The fragments that construct these poems court grammar and turn from it, their slipperiness befits both the anxiety and ambivalence— the pleasure and the trap—of attempting to name the known, the knowable, and then to find oneself snared in the constructs that such knowing compels one to inhabit.
Review
“Sara Mumolos Mortar is a book of action and reflection, of succinct dramatic moments. . . . The easy, lilting physical and metaphysical figures radiate a painterly, storybook quality that messes with the concision of Mumolos diction, her unexpected puns.” —Norma Cole, author, To Be At Music
Review
“By examining the ideology of their own careful phrasing, her poems reveal and revel in what it means for a citizen to belong simultaneously to a plurality of subject positions and symbolic systems. The surreal intersections of gender, nation, class, language and genre become, in her work, ‘an activity / not an image, a subversive motile language that dares to ‘disarm the most comfortable beliefs and critique ‘how the bourgeoisie believed in Desire. With wry feminist humor and not a little ambivalence, her poems document the psychic costs of an economy that conflates sex and capital, the female nude and the courtesan.” —Brian Teare, author, Companion Grasses
Review
"Remember the Athens, Georgia band Pylon? . . . Sara Mumolo has some of that band's jittery energy and something like their sound, which is to say the anxious, odd, and increasingly common sound of personal electronic devices rendering our insides almost entirely public.” —Graham Foust, author, A Mouth in California
Synopsis
Mortar is a text of stealth and volatility, of both explosive and empathic interactions. Just as the title connotes both the short smoothbore gun used by the military to wreak havoc, and the organic material made from cement, sand, lime and water that bonds the bricks of a cityscape together, so, too, do these poems offer both the emergency of society's destructive failings and the sometimes vexed sometimes confoundingly transformative emergence of intimacy between self and other. The fragments that construct these poems court grammar and turn from it, their slipperiness befits both the anxiety and ambivalence--the pleasure and the trap--of attempting to name the known, the knowable, and then to find oneself snared in the constructs that such knowing compels one to inhabit. Uneasy, vigilantly aware of the mire of awareness, these poems wrest from daily encounters of city life a contentious consciousness that can open, albeit explosively to each next instant.
About the Author
Sara Mumolo is a poet whose work has appeared in 1913: A Journal of Forms, Berkeley Poetry Review, Eleven Eleven, Volt, and West Wind Review, among others. She is the program manager for the MFA program in creative writing at Saint Marys College of California, the coeditor of the chapbook series Calaveras, and a poetry editor at Omnidawn. Her work Mortar was a finalist for the 1913 First Book Prize. She lives in Oakland, California.