Regaining Unconsciousness
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume?
In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mullen's striking latest, her first collection since 2013's Urban Tumbleweed, interrogates an increasingly online world with a keen eye for the eerie. "As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud" opens with the line "Smart machines armed with proprietary algorithms remain attentive to my wishes." The book inhabits a dystopian landscape in which "a computer-generated tempest agitates the Pacific," reminding readers of the inextricable relationship between technology and climate disaster. Even against the backdrop of a crumbling planet, the images are dazzling: "On your way to the end of the earth, you cruise the garish boulevard blinged out with glittering rhinestones." Mullen's poems are surprising and idiosyncratic; readers encounter robot spouses, billionaires sent to space in capsules, and an AI chatbot. The pandemic casts a shadow as the speaker sifts through a disconnected world in search of community. Ultimately, the collection celebrates human connection and spirit: "you who have been/ a creeping crawling thing,/ awake, take flight." This wildly imaginative work speaks to the present times with a powerful urgency.
