EtC explores contemporary American selfhood, socially mediated and economically motivated, within a system where we learn to see and represent ourselves as one marketable image among many, where "brand" displaces character, and the corporal and corporate intersect. Elsie is both a collection of tropes for femininity (her embodied history leaning heavily into illness and inadequacy when not floating on fantasies of power) and also a symptom of her country's illness. Almost constantly laughing, she is--obviously--unreliable. But EtC blends persona into hyper-confessionalism to open a space for honesty--the hope is that the spectacle of Elsie exercising her fraught and limited freedoms in the context of cultural, social, and environmental disasters might provide a point of critique, in order to readjust the values shaping our experience so as to move toward ways of being in the world that might be wiser, kinder, more sane, and more real.
"Our history begins with the present, a gap, 'the "spread,"' the gate that won't fully shut. The lacuna isn't to be filled with presence but lets rage sing the poems in EtC. Laura Mullen plays with citation and reliability, with versions of history and memory, and with the libidinal energy of remembering not encased in individual experience but residing in language: our Cow [Memory] Palace. 'Milk milk milk milkmilkmilk.' Or, simply: 'eeeeeee.' With vocal cords opened by a cry of vowels--that phoneme that most directly reaches the gods--Mullen releases poems that embody the poem's more impossible forms and functions."--Kimberly Alidio
"Laura Mullen's EtC is a furiously, gloriously comic jeremiad amid the darkness that envelops American society. This is a book that refuses to behave as it turns from comedy to lament and from lament to frustration. With lines torqued like a bow, these poems are arrows of social resistance."--Charles Bernstein
"Astounding leaps of imagination. These poems will change your mind."--Toi Derricotte
"At a time when the US Empire's salvage operations are acting out through battered cultural landscapes, there's a paucity of poets able to detect (let alone withstand) Empire's covert inducements in their own writing. Laura Mullen is not only one of the best decoders of ideological traps that I know of but also a master creator of liminal subjectivities that are already imagining alternate futures. In EtC, the surveillance mechanisms of gender, sex, corporate power, and militarism are deftly identified and outmaneuvered via Mullen's passionate genre-edging poetics."--Rodrigo Toscano
Poetry.
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books; recognitions for her work include MacDowell Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Rona Jaffe Award. Her translation of Véronique Pittolo's HERO was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. She holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University.
