Harryette Mullen, Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen is one of the most exciting innovative poets writing today. This landmark volume is the first of its kind, collecting Mullen’s works from 1981 to the present day. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers a full collection of Mullen’s later poetry, with a sampler of poems from her early published work. The volume includes the collections Recyclopedia, Sleeping with the Dictionary, Urban Tumbleweed, Broken Glish: Five Prose Poems, a sampler of poems from Blues Baby, and several previously uncollected poems. Five compelling scholarly essays accompany the texts, offering new insight into Mullen’s works, ranging beyond contemporary poetry to consider Mullen’s works in wider contexts. Foregrounding Mullen’s formal innovation, this Critical Edition will be indispensable to scholars and general readers of Mullen’s poetry, and contemporary avant-garde writing more widely. Her Silver-Tongued Companion offers an expansive and illuminating curation of Mullen’s extraordinary poetry, tracing the remarkable career of one of the major poets of the twenty-first century.

Harryette Mullen is Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the author of several poetry collections. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2023 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Hungarian, Kyrgyz and Vietnamese. Her poetry collections include Recyclopedia (2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of her essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, was published in 2012. Her poetry collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, was published in 2013. Open Leaves / poems from earth was published in 2023.

Georgina Colby is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. She has published widely in the field of avant-garde writing and feminisms. Her books include Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (2016), and the collections Reading Experimental Writing (2019) and, as co-editor, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (2020). She is the series editor (with Eric White) of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing.