After I Was Dead: Poems

by Laura Mullen

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 specialty, damage. / Her specialty, becoming / Something else. Her hair, falling / Leaves, leaf rot, and then soil.” Through her rediscovery of the freedom Emily Dickinson located in being “dead” (in writing from over the border of an already recognized erasure), Mullen increases the territory of the contemporary poem.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1999

About the author

Laura Mullen is the author of nine books: EtC (Solid Objects 2023), Complicated Grief, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject and Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. Her work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues).

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fueled my concept of found poetry and art in poetry.

[Parker Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were some poems in this that kinda hovered in the abstract for me, but the ones that hit hit. Also a very well organized collection.

[Kevin Aldrich · Rating 5 out of 5]

i learned that i probably do, deep down, like idaho.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh, I read most of this. I'm not Mullen's reader by any means--I found this hard to get into, which I think was the point. An interesting project that I might just be too dumb for.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was going to throw at 2 star at this or maybe a 1 star, but the second half of the book saved it for me...as in this line, "I dreamt you were fucking a chocolate cake."