Enduring Freedom

by Laura Mullen

Poetry. Taking—and twisting—the title of an Iraq operation for its own, Laura Mullen's seventh book might be summed up in the phrase André Breton famously applied to Frieda Kahlo: "a bomb with a ribbon around it." An extraordinarily comprehensive, sympathetic and scathing, catalog of brides, this collection of poems is also an examination of the emotional costs of a sustained attention to party planning in the face of an almost invisible war. Influenced equally by Italo Calvino and Martha Stewart, playing with conceptual poetry as well as Romance clichés, Mullen's poetic environment, and the language that sustains it, is as remarkable as it is disquieting.

"ENDURING FREEDOM [is] a galloping great read, a page-turner, and dazzles with linguistic mischief and wit.... I already wanted to buy it for a friend. I am thrilled by it."—Hazel White

75 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2012

About the author

Laura Mullen is the author of nine books: EtC (Solid Objects 2023), Complicated Grief, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject and Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. Her work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues). She is the Kenan Chair in the Humanities at Wake Forest University.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forty poems in prose to fend off an interpellation. Mullen deploys a rhetorically directive metonymy shared in the voice's hailing a subject whose erotic counter-trope is the subject's being hailed by words' slippery lexical planes. Take the phrase Enduring Freedom. You wouldn't think Mullen (b. 1958) regards freedom as something that need be endured. Or, you would be a reader new to Mullen to miss how overdetermined is a phrase that names the mission for our military operations in Afghanistan. That each "newness" has an interpellative plane suggests why The Little Book of Mechanical Brides (the book's subtitle) are perceived in terms of their machinery -- the mechanistic aspect of these planes is what the book seems to be fending.

The task is to make person from the myriad tableau of matrimonial virtue -- a palette of conventional images accessible to any Netflix rom-com binge but also identifiable through a Steinian acquaintance with description in which landscape and social observation stain how we play words with each other -- while acknowledging virtue's mis-named exception as that overdetermination the State endeavors genocidally to protect. So when, in "Bride of the Bayou," "She seemed, once, so wild and tamed, so exactly the right combination of unspoiled and viewable, adventurous and predictable," the personal pronoun slides between epithet (Bride) and regional geographical category (Bayou) -- some slippery planes. Mullen turns this predicament into a pretty bawdy equivocation before tonally shifting to a directive rhetoric (a stylistic swash) for how Bride and landscape-describer compensate each other: "Use your imagination -- recreate among the dying trees stuck in cracked silt the shapes of dead and gone things [. . .] as the bride turns, almost at once, into the wistful, increasingly edgy wife . . . on her way to becoming the more or less gently resentful mother, scrubbing down the toilet with a wad of filthy lace."

The play throughout between wedding and war can't help but call up Michael Rossman's meditation on his experience as a direct action junkie, The Wedding Within the War, THE best book about Berkeley in the Sixties. Wedding Within the War