The Tales of Horror: (A Flip-Book) - Tapa blanda

Fiction. Poetry. Laura Mullen's clever postmodern gothic is a tour de force. 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? The tale is disassembled to offer alternate reading -- as a story, as a flipbook, and as a text scored for old and familiar voices. The ancient house the abandoned house the house that has been like that forever ... Dark shape in its bed of rank weeds its entrance gaping but not I was wrong like that/ Forever a shred of white lace at a broken window insisted on history.

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. Mullen received her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before going to teach at, among other places, Colorado State University, where her courses included seminars on Modernism, Postmodernism, and Cross-Genre Writing. She's also been invited as a guest author to teach at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program (1996, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2008), Columbia College - Chicago - (spring semester 2003), Brown University (2001), and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop Summer Program, (1998). She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1988 and has since received numerous "ther fellowships in the United States and abroad. She is currently on the permanent faculty at Louisiana State University where her teaching and research interests include Creative Writing, Literature, Translation, Poetry, Fiction, and Film.