Harryette Mullen straddles the worlds of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and the hip-hop crowd. She has amazing dexterity when fooling with words. I first fell in love with her work when I encountered Muse & Drudge as a graduate student at the Bennington Writing Seminars and have been hooked ever since. While "doing away" with meaning, she nevertheless creates new meanings as her lines and sentences pile up, accumulating in your mind. Graywolf has thankfully published this volume which collects three of her out-of-print books and puts them together between two covers.

Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary

 

if you turned down the media
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.

“Mullen’s is a stunningly lyrical voice, rich and resonant, engaged and engaging.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“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

HARRYETTE MULLEN teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Imprint: Graywolf Press
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 10-31-2006
Pages: 176
Measurements: 9.00in X 6.00in