{"product_id":"dark-archive-new-california-poetry-volume-32-0520268865","title":"Dark Archive (New California Poetry) (Volume 32)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eISBN:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0520268865\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/strong\u003e Mullen, Laura\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCondition:\u003c\/strong\u003e New\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eReviewA strong collection of poetry. -- Greg Langley - Baton Rouge Advocate Published On: 2011-06-12Product DescriptionDark 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 connection-and 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.From Publishers WeeklyGreat 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.\" (Feb.)(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.From the Inside FlapYou 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 TavernPraise for Subject:Compelling.Julie Reid, Poetry Project NewsletterSubject limns the rough and ragged borders of identity. It needles though traditional ideas of what occurs within self and outside of (without) self.Geoffrey Goodwin, Spider Words MagazinePraise for After I Was Dead:A powerful reconstruction of self?. Wildly versatile formally, restlessly roving from verse to prose to epistle and back. Taken collectively it reads as resistance of structures.Sam White, Boston ReviewThe poems in After I Was Dead expose language where it is most vulnerable, most likely to fail: in the abstract diction of human speech. The voice feels actual, audible.Kim Fortier, Rain TaxiDespite the reassurances of our good looks with which lesser poets woo us, we are not so dead that we do not respond with a kind of happiness to this unexpected demonstration that truth really is beauty.Christopher Davis, The JournalFrom the Back CoverYou know you cant right the disaster, or even write the disaster, but now you know, in reading Dark Archive, that you\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mia Karts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51939584803104,"sku":"NEW0520268865","price":28.44,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/miakarts.com\/products\/dark-archive-new-california-poetry-volume-32-0520268865","provider":"Miakarts Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}