Laura Mullen

"Here enter the stock elements of the generic horror tale: the haunted house, the doctor, the down-to-earth gardener, the chatty housemaid, the sunny morning and dark portentous night. At the center, a beautiful woman is dead. But is she?" --Back cover.

The poems of After I Was Dead develop harmonically and leap from one register, one voice, one tone to another in deft juxtapositions and are honed by a fine intelligence into elegant, sometimes funny art. 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.