Laura Mullen is a star or a multi-colored fish.  Perhaps both.  Swimming through form while simultaneously interrogating meaning with a sodium glare.  Someday she might earn her own constellation in the iridescent tapestry of night.

              The only issue is that her new collection is, um, too good for genre.  Subject limns the rough and ragged borders of identity.  It needles though traditional ideas of what occurs within self and outside of (without) self.  And that might be too complicated for the typical horror fan.

              So we’ll back up.  After I Was Dead, Mullen’s second collection, is of merit to a horror buff.  It looks deep into how self, theory and sanity can all appear blurry if you stare long enough.  With multiple voices, the poems play with ideas like troubled relationships and vanishing, mysterious structures.  (One of the best poems is called “Mystery House” and appeared in Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse – named after the Surrealist parlor game, not the novel by Poppy Z. Brite that took the phrase in a completely different direction.)  After I Was Dead possesses a quiet intertextuality that helps support the central concept of drifting between boundaries.

              Then, and not enough people know about it and it’s a daring work, The Tales of Horror came out in 1999.  With fragmented lyricism, Mullen got so far inside the haunted gothic clichés of a woman fleeing a house in the night that the clichés were reinvigorated.  In a note describing the process of writing the book, Laura Mullen described her memory of “novels with thinly clad women on their well-protected dust jackets, out in some storm in the middle of the night at the base of sheer cliffs on which a castle...et cetera.”  Mullen obliterates that memory and makes it all scary again.

              The Tales of Horror has such control of styles, diction and speech that they boil themselves down.  It’s like she extracts the scary heart of the Gothic and shows it off, waving it around.  Using the stock characters of the form, with a prosepoem meets poetry feel, Mullen snips to the quick.  Oddly experimental lines and mad narratives (that have a feminine / feminist lilt that many of the actual Gothics, especially the ones written by men using pseudonyms, lack) examine how ghosts linger and inhabit space.

              (Let’s not forget that one reading of Shelley’s Frankenstein sees that novel as a diatribe against mechanized life by a young woman whose barren womb had been brutalized by amateur – by today’s standards – surgeons intent on creating babies…)

                                        So, taken for the monstrous and definitive work that it is, The Tales of Horror is a masterpiece.  An experimental work that is slimmer than Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves but probably belongs next to it – and the HoL tie-in album by Danielewski’s sister Poe called Haunted – on a shelf.

              Where does this leave Subject, her new collection, then?  It’s much more fragmented.  Parenthesis, quotation marks and slashes are left open-ended and intentionally serve to complicate / confuse meaning.  Wordplay, sound and vague hints at shards of the collective unconscious drifting through are primary tools.  Holding on to any attempt at meaning forces the reader to consider the possibility that the book is rearranging itself in their hands.

              It’s too bad that Americans don’t carry groundbreaking poetry collections around with them.  It might help the country realize that it’s better to be killed by a disease than by an attempt to cure it.

              People who sometimes don’t “get” poetry are doomed if they try to read Subject.  And it’s not Mullen’s fault, it’s the dearth of good readers.  Pop songs and Hallmark cards have numbed the minds of millions.  The three poems in the Translation Series, and also “Empty,” “The Distance (This)” and “Applications Of” are favorites, but it’s hard to know what the average reader would think of:

“My factor

              / plicated (placater                      (opt       optative

  struggles                          Away already lost reference returning to material

                                                                                                                                            slur

Our      (counter)  faulter”

                            (Glaces A Repetition, p. 28)

              As such, with a heav(ing)y heart, a reviewer can only hope that there are still people who read Thalia Field, Kass Fleisher or Carole Maso and that those brave and wonderful readers will gasp with joy when they open Laura Mullen’s Subject.  And bless them, every last one.

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