Sleeping with the Dictionary

Reviews / Votes

"Thoroughly delights and constantly surprises. Consisting primarily of short prose poems, this collection highlights Mullen's finely tuned sense of humor and sharp social criticism." * African American Review * "Mullen does not have a Platonic relationship with the dictionary. She does not strive to represent ideas, but to experience an erotic encounter with language in which meanings proliferate. These poems are driven not by control but by possibility as a value, "scattering scat / sporadically all over / forever diaspora." As Sleeping with the Dictionary illustrates, such an affair can be quite a roil in the play." * Georgia Review * "Manipulating language that is "corny," "lame," or "bad" - such as archaism, slang, dialect, etc. - Mullen creates puzzles that urge us to confront the historical and social specificity of the linguistic perspectives we bring to reading." * Modern Language Studies * "These idiosyncratic, gleeful poems are designed not to lull or dolefully solace, but to joke, jeer, babble and commit disorderly conduct till standard hierarchies and power relationships are quite discombobulated." * Newsday * "Sleeping with the Dictionary engages questions of racial, sexual, community, and cultural politics within a rigorous yet playful framework of formal experimentation. . . . What is wonderful about Mullen's poetry is that its moments of disruption, cultural reference, and punning are moments that might be read completely differently by different readers." * Chicago Review * "A delightful, challenging collection. Mullen's words do indeed play well with others-they engage in humorous, ironic, and scathing play (sometimes all at the same time) with other words in her poems and with the "other" of the reader." * Callaloo *