This powerful collection of poems from Laura Mullen is the edgy, unashamedly experimental, and formally inventive book of a poet who has found her way to her own voice or style--or rather voices and styles, for there are several. The poems of "After I Was Dead" develop harmonically rather than melodically: they leap from one register, one voice, one tone to another in deft juxtapositions that carry narrative only incidentally, destabilizing traditional notions of development. These poems are honed by a fine intelligence into elegant, sometimes funny art, as in Autumn: Her hair, brown. / Her...

Dark archive: The purpose of a dark archive is to function as a repository for information that can be used as a failsafe during disaster recovery.
Laura Mullen s fourth collection is a sequence of beautifully interrelated poems that explores how to accurately represent the reality of change and loss. Mullen pinpoints what is at stake: the possibility of communication and connectionand the hope of intimacy. Invoking Wordsworth s I wandered lonely as a cloud, she pushes experiments in consciousness against their boundaries in an array of poetic forms. Poetic tropes are measured against...