Laura Mullen Biography | Poet

Laura Mullen (b. 1958 — ) in Los Angeles, is a contemporary American poet working in hybrid genres and traditions. As with the poetry of (among many others) Cole Swensen, her work is considered Postmodern and post-Language school, but it also takes a lot from her interests in Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe and numerous authors and visual artists who fall outside of the poetic cannon. This explains that, among her five published books, one finds the post-modern gothic, The Tales of Horror (Kelsey St. Press), traditional formed poems such as the "sestina in which my grandmother is going deaf" in The Surface, and a prose-poetry-crime novel-postmodern language text: Murmur (Futurepoem Books, 2007). In fact, Mullen’s work holds the mirror up to language, attempting to find out (and find ways out of ) the limits of the wor(l)ds we are sentenced to. The lyric impulse exists in her writing, but the surface is rough, like her jagged language use at times, reflecting the violence of the effort to see into seeing itself.. American poet