Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Paperback)

by Harryette Mullen (Author) "Becoming, for a song..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Mullen's avant-garde word games, applied to the marrow of African-American experience, rightly won plaudits for Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002): poets and critics alert to innovation knew about Mullen a decade earlier, when three small-press volumes put her on the map. The contents of all three reappear in this collection, along with a brief new preface from Mullen. The first two (as she explains) build on Gertrude Stein's great modernist prose poems, full of non sequiturs and sexual puns, to make language undermine racist clichés: "The color 'nude,' a flesh tone. Whose flesh unfolds barely, appealing tan. Shelf life of stacked goods." The slightly longer paragraphs of the second volume (whose title means both "supermarket" and "sperm kit") are more complicated and self-conscious: "So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant. Devoid of colored labels, the discounted irregulars." The ambitious if sometimes scattered Muse & Drudge abandons prose poetry for long chains of irregularly rhymed quatrains, taking on politics, poetics and history: "how a border orders disorder/ how the children looked/ whose mothers worked/ in the maquiladora." Linguistic experiment has rarely sounded so bluesy and cool. (Nov.)
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Review
Readers can track the evolving process of this poet's craft. And it is an evolution. -- Library Journal

Recyclopedia [points to the] . . . simultaneity of language, a replicable and mutable Big Bang of thematic, linguistic, syntactic, and formal combination. -- Boston Review

[Mullen is] at play but refusing to be played, Sappho and "juicy fruit" [fall] into [one] poem without pastiche, anachronis[m]. -- Bookforum

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (October 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974562
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974565
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #257,007 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars spirals and kinky quatrains, July 30, 2008

By	S. Muench (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mullen's three book collection is vertiginous and virtuosic. Her punning and homophonic-connotative cleverness which stacks her poems into multi-valenced spinning tops dizzies one's head with cloudy turbulence. She should be written multiple "wolf tickets" for speeding. If you don't appreciate this book on a first read, please revisit it at a later date.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recycle this book!!, March 8, 2007

By	Nicole Darden "bronze1" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Share this book with your poet-friends, family, random people you meet on the street. Avant-Garde poetry at its best. This book is changing my life. Harryette Mullen is brilliant and inspiring!