Harryette Romell Mullen

Blues Baby: Early Poems brings together Harryette Mullen's first book, Tree Tall Woman, with previously uncollected poems from the beginning of her career. Her early poems draw inspiration from the feminist and Black Arts movements, as well as her connections to diverse communities of writers and artists. The movement of this volume is loosely autobiographical -- from childhood narratives to poems about sexuality to indirect evocations of the poet's art. Many of the poems address the subject of family and community, often emphasizing the strength of women and female friendship; some evoke culturally specific traditions and locations; others of a satiric nature offer cultural critiques.

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author.

"The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen's own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women's voices, and the future of poetry"--

Speech/Acts' brings together new and recent works by a generation of artists influenced by black experimental poetry. Recognizing language as a primary method of expressing and maintaining power, these artists use poetry as a tool to manipulate the conceptual and structural elements of language and the social contexts in which language is employed, appropriated and abstracted. Artists Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Martine Syms all use experimental poetry in their work as a means to interrogate the power structures of language, rendering the experience of blackness more physically and affectively exact. In this volume, their work is presented alongside their poetic forerunners (seminal texts by Fred Moten and Harryette Mullen are reprinted), newly commissioned poetry by Morgan Parker and Simone White, and a new essay by curator Meg Onli.