Harryette Mullen, Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen

(Paperback)

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Harryette Mullen is one of the most exciting innovative poets writing today. This landmark volume is the first of its kind, collecting Mullen's works from 1981 to the present day. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers a full collection of Mullen's later poetry, with a sampler of poems from her early published work. The volume includes the collections Recyclopedia, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Urban Tumbleweed, Broken Glish: Five Prose Poems, a sampler of poems from Blues Baby, and several previously uncollected poems. Five compelling scholarly essays accompany the texts, offering new insight into Mullen's works, ranging beyond contemporary poetry to consider Mullen's works in wider contexts. Foregrounding Mullen's formal innovation, this Critical Edition will be indispensable to scholars and general readers of Mullen's poetry, and contemporary avant-garde writing more widely. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers an expansive and illuminating curation of Mullen's extraordinary poetry, tracing the remarkable career of one of the major poets of the twenty-first century.

Reviews

With Her Silver Tongued Companion, we are gifted the most complete critical edition to date of one of our greatest poets. Never-before-seen unpublished work in conversation with new critical writings and beloved collections is a crucial advancement of scholarship in contemporary poetry. Harryette Mullen's work opens a space for infinite readings and readerships, interrogating the notion of a single audience; as she has stated, "I write for myself and others. An other is anyone who is not me. Anyone who is not me is like me in some ways and unlike me in other ways. I write, optimistically, for an imagined audience of known and unknown readers." Mullen's poems insist that Blackness and the avant-garde are inextricable; her commitment to formal innovation, sonic virtuosity, intertextuality, and her utilization of techniques from many important poetry movements (Oulipo, Language Poetry, Feminist Poetry) makes her a singular figure in American literature. With the breadth of work represented in these pages, we can finally see the artistic trajectory of a decades-long career accompanied by the critical inquiry it deserves. This is an essential collection for both lifelong readers of Mullen and those new to her exhilarating work.--Claudia Rankine, author of Just Us: An American Conversation and Citizen: An American Lyric

Author Bio

Georgina Colby is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. She has published widely in the field of avant-garde writing and feminisms. Her books include Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (2016), and the collections Reading Experimental Writing (2019) and, as co-editor, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (2020). She is the series editor (with Eric White) of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing.