Synopses & Reviews
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 Mullens 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 connectionand the hope of intimacy. Invoking Wordsworths 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.
Review
"A strong collection of poetry."--Baton Rouge Advocate
Review
“A strong collection of poetry.” Greg Langley
Synopsis
You know you cant right the disaster, or even write the disaster, but now you know, in reading
Dark Archive, that you can ride the evanescence that comes before and after. Mullens shapes shift, disappear like the living but remain like lives, as sharp curved traces, jarred angles of incidence/vantage/glance. See how veer, wander, being dragged, suffering restructuring, turn into new solids, solidarities of moving, hard-edged lyric social work in solitude, for the crowd, against loneliness, which is really, really cool.”
Fred Moten, author of Hughsons Tavern
Praise for
About the Author
Laura Mullens first collection of poems, The Surface, was chosen as a National Poetry Series selection; her second collection, After I Was Dead, was selected for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. She is also the author of Subject (UC Press), and two hybrid texts: The Tales of Horror and Murmur.
Table of Contents
System
Acknowledgments
Cloud Cover
window/ candle
No Voice
In the Space between Words Begin
Remediation Attempt
I Wandered Networks like a Cloud
The Author Is Not
I Wandered (Phony) As
By and By
Little Landscape
I Wandered Her Voice
The Proofs Arrive
As
Stratocumulus
Prose Poem
White Box
Original Material
Studying Clouds (A Trick of the Light)
Parts of Speech
Sound Barrier
Cloud as Lonely
Images, Similes, Some Alliteration
Collide and Coalesce
Code
The White Box of Mirror Dissolved Is Not Singular
Passages
Turn
If
TURN
OWN STRING
A POOL POOLS
IN YOU INSIDE
WREST WORD CLOUD
NO ON COINAGE
EX SELF
EXPANSION EXPANSION
WILDERNESS HERE MATTER
EAST LAST
TRUTH HOUSE MATERIALS PUBLICITY
TRUTH END
POLIS IS SPACE
SAME SAME
NAME CRIME
EXAMPLE AMERICA
INTERPRETING TURNING THINGS
UTTER UTTERLY
Troposphere
Pass
Cloud Seeding: From a Journal
The Visual World behind My Head
Virga
Orographic
(Stratus) Endlessness
Cloud Money
Message
Daisies
On a Clear Day
Love (Stratus)
Love (Stratus Opacus)
Love (Opacus)
Love (Scud)
Edge of There
Love (Altocumulus Translucidus and Altostratus Opacus)
Desire
(Pieces from the Broken Roof of an Abandoned Passage)
After-Image (Louisiana Company)
Spoke of a Blueprint
Should Have Ended
The Motif Modifies Space
Even in My Dreams the Knowledge
Ghost Mist
Evaporation / Condensation