Regaining Unconsciousness: Poems

by Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume?

In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.

Genres: Poetry, African American

144 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 5, 2025

About the author

Harryette Mullen is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. She was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. She wrote poems such as Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name.

Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.

Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981.

Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background.

Mullen has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010.

Reviews

[Carey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sealey Challenge 2025: 2/31

This poetry collection offers a timely reflection on major global and societal issues, including COVID-19, racial injustice, political unrest, overconsumption, and climate change. Structurally, it’s quite strong — the collection is thoughtfully divided into sections, and the poems are arranged in a way that maintains a coherent flow. I appreciated the stylistic range, which moved between stream-of-consciousness and more traditional prose forms. This variety helped keep the pacing engaging and showed Harryette Mullen's knack for versatility.

However, while the range of topics and styles was impressive, the collection’s size worked against it at times. Certain poems stood out with clarity and emotional depth, but others felt overly ambiguous, requiring more effort from the reader to uncover meaning. That ambiguity, while perhaps intentional, left some pieces feeling underdeveloped or inaccessible. This criticism aside, I will say that for such a large collection I never felt like the poems became repetitive.

Overall, this is a well-structured and thematically relevant collection with some real standouts. My favorites were: "Still Waiting," "Natural History," "Departed," "Now's Not the Time for Your Tears," "Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name," "Concrete Steps," and "Implications". Though at times the impact of some poems is somewhat diluted by inconsistency in conveying a clear message, I still think this one is worth the read!

Thank you to the publisher, Graywolf Press, for an e-ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions shared in this review are my own!

[Mariah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love a poetry collection that surpasses expectations and finds the heart of their narrative through experimental forms, prose poems, and a passion for writing. This is a loud collection that creates a space for marginalized voices to be heard from poem to poem. If the cover does not convince you then their enticing lyrical writing should be enough reason to dive into the abyss with this one. These are poems with subjects and the content related to them is deep, but they are also metaphors for how society subjects people to racism, rigid gender constructs, and hateful political rhetoric.
The prose poetry is a persistent form in this collection, and it really gave the author a format to express the way society has repressed their voice. This also amplifies the voices of their community ensuring that this message must be heard. Highlighting racial disparities and having the audience sit and listen to really soak in the words. The diction really illuminates the struggles and highlights where the message needs to be listened to the most.
Love the metaphors of weather and the forecast that is not just about weather patterns and climate change. It’s a forecast of society and the consequences of behaviors. “Weathering Hate” explores the way dangerous rhetoric has impaired society and set society back due to the inclement persistent push of misinformation in recent times. The line break in “Wind is Pink” really constructs the emotional impact from the actions mentioned in such a short poem. Read this thrice to really soak it in.
The hints of vegan discussion and activism in “Luvtofu” is a poem about tofu. But how else can we apply to the versatility of the facets of our personality trying to dissuade freedom of expression? Think about that as you read this through. Then we have “Mermaid of Palmares” that expresses the thirst we have for something more and something better than the state we are given. These are just a few shout outs to the myriad fabulous poems in this collection that make tidal waves of sound.
This collection is a well organized streamline of thoughts through experimental poetry forms, prose poetry, and lyrical forms that really tie the message of racial and social injustices occurring today. This is my favorite future release of poetry thus far. Thank you NetGalley and Greywolf Press for this advanced digital copy and an opportunity to leave an honest review!


Read more of my reviews on https://brujerialibrary.wordpress.com

[Courtney Ferriter · Rating 5 out of 5]

** 5 stars **

A thought-provoking collection of experimental and experiential poems that speaks to contemporary events in society from the COVID pandemic onward. This has been my favorite collection of Mullen's I've read since Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002).

I had several favorites from this volume, but if you enjoy the following poem (which is fresh take on a Wordsworth poem), then I think you would like this collection as a whole:

"As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud"
Smart machines armed with proprietary algorithms remain attentive to my
wishes. They use a little known, mysterious mental faculty to anticipate my
urges. Ingenious applications of intelligence solve the problem of desire.

By now, their ability seems less arcane, considering how my aspirations
may be formulated to coincide with goods and services of marketers whose
product lines cohabit in the cloud with the history of all my searches as I
browse, added to the sum of my mediated sociality.

The cloud's vast, expanding, and indefinite memory stores all the information
I create in my interlinked communications, including what I'm writing to
you now, as on my couch I multitask in pensive mood, opening my mail to
find a discount coupon reminding me that nothing says spring like daffodils.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

The generous and spectacular collection we’ve been waiting for, from one of the country’s most important poets, these poems resist the pressure to be invested in “uplift,” knowing that—as Baldwin put it—whatever you hope to change must first be faced. Honest, insightful, deft, original and open, Mullen’s 12th book is a great treasure and an invitation to inhabit our challenging moment fully.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud
Smart machines armed with proprietary algorithms remain attentive to my wishes. They use a little known, mysterious mental faculty to anticipate my urges. Ingenious applications of intelligence solve the problems of desire.

By now, their ability seems less arcane, considering how my aspirations may be formulated to coincide with goods and services of marketers whose product lines cohabit in the cloud with the history of all my searches as I browse, added to the sum of my mediated sociality.

The cloud's vast, expanding, and indefinite memory stores all the information I create in my interlinked communications, including what I'm writing to you now, as on my couch I multitask in pensive mood, opening my mail to find a discount coupon reminding me that nothing says spring like daffodils. (7)

Iconoclast
I hurl a stone no hand has carved, wondering who
shall admire my craft. In emergent air, I
create a clamor, scattering simple smithereens.
If shattering provokes, I relish,
not regret, this furious mission of
a menace refusing to be manicured. As a poet would
note, my jagged mosaic makes
a masterpiece of mayhem, implodes a
hole in their display of polished amplitude.
If their pane is repaired, my risking hurt remains,
not healed, but heard, my handiwork composed for
an eye sighting a prize, an ear tuned to heed this
overture, as the work begins with
a shrine to my inconsequence smashed—its
desecration, my creation. (19)

Natural History
A skilled glassblower exhales a molten bubble. Burning liquid cools into a perfectly transparent globe. Within the crystal sphere, a primal landscape of abundant life. In this elemental scene, a captive herd of triceratops graze, contented, unaware of confinement.

They have never known the humiliation of an embezzler, handcuffed, doing the perp walk in an orange jumpsuit, or the psychosis of a condemned murderer, staring at nothing, locked in a windowless cell on death row.

Formidable creatures, inside their glass ball, they feel as free as songbirds that don’t yet exist. Supersize reptiles stomp and chomp primordial vegetation, mossy trees waving ferny fronds. As soon as they eat a meal, horny beasts start farting and belching, releasing greenhouse gas that fuels the teeming forest.

Enclosed in their fragile dome, a bunch of big-boned lizards that never glanced at a hominid, never voted in an election, never built a machine, composed a melody, or solved an equation. Neither have they pondered the meaning of life, nor funded their retirement. Somehow, they don’t seem anxious or depressed. As a flurry of snowflakes swirls in their tropical zone, not one of them dreams of leaves turning to oil, or coal to diamonds. (37)

Goner
In this interminable absence,
annihilation is blunt certainty.
The desert speaks lucidly,
parsing exhausted iotas of dust.
Whatever lives here evolves
toward extinction
clad in brutal veneers
of scant survival.
Ecstatic snakes inhabit
radiant desolation
no less scathing than
malignant sun staring down
at a ruinous landscape. (57)

The Gap
When everyone is equal, then each is lost in the crowd. My clothes, my car, my credit score allow me to stand out, yet conform. The rough inequalities we all acknowledge, a widening gap that threatens demise. The gap is the future where I point my gun. What remains an influential treatise on democracy began with a tour of the penal system in a country led by a long line of horse-breakers and tiger killers. (77)

White Rhinos
Long thought to be extinct in the wild, white rhinos are making a comeback. Since prehistoric time, rhinos have lumbered across their terrain like armored Humvees, unconcerned with natural enemies before the hard-nosed global marked led to their decline. In their contemporary plight, vulnerable to encroachment on their turf, they suffer losses to poachers and trophy hunters who harvest their parts as the rhinos relax at favorite watering holes in their native habitat.

Quite recently, it's been observed that rhinos are rebounding. Even as the older ones die off, their population is sustained, at least in their protected reserve, suggesting that white rhinos have a future, after all. Actually, this species is mostly tweedy gray, fashionably tan, or dusty beige of khaki chinos. They are white in name only. (96)

Life as a Gringo
The curse of life as a pattyroller tormented by a symphony of minstrels.
The capstone of lice as a periwig truncated by a semblance of mediocrity.
The cult of larceny as a pilferer tempted by a surplus of merchandise.
The creaking of leather as a pioneer tanned by a sunbeam of mortality.
The cocaine of lounge lizards as a piñata torched by a swig of mezcal.
The cartoon of Leviathan as a polka dot tricked by a simulacrum of mystery.
The consummation of lust as a pug-ugly tickled by a surfeit of melodrama.
The currency of lying as a profiteer tutored by a scholar of monetary policy.
The constancy of ligatures as a predator taunted by a stagflation of multibillionaires.
The cushion of lush life as a pornographer torn by a scalpel of misery.
The costume of legitimacy as a patriot trampled by a skinhead of manifest destiny.
The chemistry of Lilium as a pimple cream test-marketed by a skimption of majority.
The curtain of languishing as a pipsqueak telegraphed by a signal of marginality. (125)

[Rhiley Jade · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for the E-ARC! This E-ARC was sent to me in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately, this collection wasn't for me.
I couldn't connect to any of the poems like I assumed I would. I had high hopes and they fell flat. I wanted more than what I was getting, the poems felt dull. It could also be that I wasn't a fan of how the ARC was formatted?
I don't think I'll be picking up a physical copy.

[Brice Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley & Graywolf Press for the ARC!

Harryette Mullen’s Regaining Unconsciousness is an apocalyptic playground for a gifted poet in her final form—a writer with nothing to lose because she occupies a world with everything to lose.

A book-opening quote from Freud illuminates the purpose behind the collection's title—these poems prod readers not to ignorance, but to the confidence of perceived immortality. We imagine destruction, but what if we looked at destruction and imagined something on the other side?

Sometimes it’s aspirational. Sometimes it’s damnable.

As the poet puts it in “The Only Ones,” - we / follow tomorrow, / standing ready to welcome / the improbable.

Mullen has always been a fascinating and fun poet, lightly dancing across forms. Her language play feels like play, and readers of Sleeping with the Dictionary will appreciate the return of those hip-hop shaded cadences. Likewise, if you’re familiar with any of the books in Recyclopedia, you’ll recognize the heft of the poet’s social critique. Mullen excels in contrast, inventing rhyme schemes only to let them stall out and collapse, or using the shapeless abstractions of one poem to make lines like “Black women have a high rate of mortality” land with the blunt force they deserve.

The poet’s earlier work was often noted for how it utilized code-switching, but whether it’s because cultural discourse has changed or Mullen is even more chameleonic than before, “Regaining Unconsciousness” seems to explode register at every moment. Everything is fair game, and that’s because everything is in crisis. A goofily direct subversion of “Part of Your World” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid might bemoan widespread ocean pollution, but Mullen extends that same apocalyptic significance to post-break-up pain.

It’s all the end of the world.

Often, I find that writers fall into reductionism by fixating on a “pet issue,” often deliberately ignoring others. Mullen seems to have a deep conviction—and rich understanding—that all power structures facilitate corruption. She approaches these structures with nuance that comforts more often than it condemns, suggesting limits to personal complicity.

But we are complicit.

The section on COVID, “Now’s Not The Time For Your Tears,” works because it avoids the impulse to romanticize crisis. I’ve read far too many books that wax nostalgic about making sourdough, and Mullen seems to agree. We might have been horrified to go without toilet paper, but that’s pathetic, not poetic. The speaker draws attention to the people who were shackled by the supply chain—the people who made sure we could get any toilet paper at all. We are responsible for how our consumption consumes others.

That said, some things are outside of our control. In pieces like “Chili Today, Hot Tamale,” the speaker notes that the cost of a breakfast burrito is a decimated environment, but “we only wanted cheap fast food. . .” The “we” is generous in its ambiguity, and within the context of the whole collection, it feels like our culpability is forgivable—everyone still needs to eat. We can aspire to more, but some of these problems likely remain beyond our personal control.

In the end, it feels like Mullen is getting at a simple idea—we need forgiveness as much as we need accountability if we are to imagine a future worth having. Without it, apathy is our only recourse. Our actions condemn us, but if we want to move past them, we need to understand and forgive the mindset that led to them.

As always, Harryette Mullen’s work demands more attention than one can give it in a few reads, but Regaining Unconsciousness is a book that rewards readers for their time. I can’t wait to revisit it.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Annunciation

Each day begins not knowing what will happen. The sun as it rises sends warm light through cold windowpane, illuminates the bed, already made. Looking out at a definite landscape, you open to the sun— leaning into its radiance, let yourself be taken by the light.

Clever and modern, dystopian and prescient, these poems do hit all the notes of what it means to be alive in these times, and I can’t imagine how they will stand the test of time. But they will as testimony to the injustices and inequalities as well as the moments that we will remember as clear as day.

Atmospheric River
Wider than the Nile, you’d suck a lot of whirlpools into super-soaker scenes, oh heartbreaking muckraker. Wherever you’re flowing, I’m rowing away. Was I so dry you had to rearrange the sky? If water were whiskey and I were a drunk, though you never shared a drip or a drop in a drought, you could cry me an atmospheric river, now that I’ve swallowed an ocean of forever industrial chemicals and microplastic waste, been so thirsty for you.

Regaining Unconsciousness

Are there animals that do not sleep? —Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi

Too late to break our fall, we land on pointlessness, eternal void of feeble souls. Safe for now, but beyond rescue. Our trials continue with inexhaustible fire as we reckon the damage. Shriveling fruit, curdling scars, shrinking flesh, eroding earth and bone. Wasted bodies sprawl where they drop, in fields lit up, harsh, bright, as survivors retreat to tighter formations. Later, regaining unconsciousness, we toast the drought with dry martinis. We play to lose and drink to get sober. Lasers restore blank looks misplaced in cracked mirrors. Doubtful clouds seek carefree rainbows. Expert handlers adjust our autonomy and send us back into the fray.

Commedia dell’Arte

Clouds define a sky as weather paints a mood—gray, blue, or sunny bright. Beneath the clouds, a figure on a windswept shore ponders weightlessness, glimpses emblems of untethered aspiration’s ephemeral joy. Elements expose a crumbled architecture of impermanence supporting actors rehearsing pantomime on unstable stages. Here or anywhere their habitual costumes unseasonable.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like writing that is smart and fun, serious and funny often in the same poem, you will like this book. I read a couple of her previous books, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, both of which I loved (and own copies of) and she has got me hooked now. Here's a sample from this book, called "As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud" (we've only read the title and it's already good):

Smart Machines armed with proprietary algorithms remain attentive to my
wishes. They use a little known, mysterious mental faculty to anticipate my
urges. Ingenious applications of intelligence solve the problem of desire.

By now, their ability seems less arcane, considering how my aspirations
may be formulated to coincide with goods and services of marketers whose
product lines cohabit in the cloud with the history of all my searches as I
browse, added to the sum of my mediated sociality.

The cloud's vast, expanding, and indefinite memory stores all the information
I create in my interlinked communications, including what I'm writing to
you now, as on my couch I multitask in pensive mood, opening my mail to
find a discount coupon reminding me that nothing says spring like daffodils.

I like how this poem could stand on its own if you had never heard of Wordsworth, but is even more enjoyable if you have read "I wandered lonely as a cloud."

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning, heart-full book that will delight, disturb, and surprise poetry lovers.
Exacting words like images cut away to the bone, I found it hard to relax while reading this book! It is not meant to lull anyone, but to wake us up to the stark reality of what we have here, in this pedal-to-the metal world hurtling through time like a non stop rocket to where? She gives advice, my favorite piece of it being " ..in the hottest summer of the hottest year, in the hottest decade ever, you'll want a cold shower and a sip of champagne."
The double meanings in the poem about how much she loves tofu are, alone, worth the price of the book.
I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Ms. Mullen's poetry this year during the Decatur Book Festival, and she signed my book "Congratulations on publishing your poetry in a soon-to-be-famous journal!" One can only hope!
In the meantime, while I'm awaiting results of more submissions, I'm going to re-read this book.
I highly recommend this book for all poets and poetry lovers!

[Alexandra Dav · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5✨

M-a atras coperta superbă, așa că am zis să aflu ce se ascunde între pagini.

Din păcate, n-am reușit să rezonez cu o bună parte dintre poezii și texte. Pe unele nu le-am înțeles pentru că n-am trecut prin situații asemănătoare, iar unele nu mi-au transmis nimic.
Deși bine structurată, mi s-a părut cam lungă. Câteodată aveam chiar și senzația că nu se mai termină.
Pe de altă parte, au fost câteva poezii foarte frumos scrise, pline de profunzime și emoții. Au fost și câteva care mi-au dat de gândit, ceea ce e întotdeauna de apreciat.

În concluzie, chiar dacă nu ne-am înțeles atât de bine pe cât mi-aș fi dorit, mă bucur că am citit-o. Mi-ar fi rămas în minte.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection, the poet addresses some timely issues—the pandemic, racism, school shootings, gun violence, the threat of AI and technology takeovers, climate change, extinctions, Armageddon—with deadpan humor dripping with irony, plus adds a few parodies of poems by well-known poets (e.g., Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”) for good measure. Fabulous title and intriguing cover!


Favorite Poems:
“As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud”
“Weathering Hate”
“Trip of the Tongue”
“Forecast”
“Holy Word”
“Never Touch the Hair of a Goddess”
“Tequila Sunset”
“Chatter Box”
“Spam for President”
“Spin Cycle”
“Something Like If”
“On a Lark’s Wing”
“Hopeful Noise”

[Alesa Bernat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection was diverse in its topics. ranging from artificial intelligence, capitalism, pollution, racism, etc. This was my first experience with Harryette Mullen. The collection was organized into sections mostly based on type of topic, but the poems within each section were incredibly varied in style, form, imagery, symbolism, and depth. I think this is a poet who is seasoned and strong in craft, but the collection wasn't to my current taste. The idea of consciousness and cultural or world awareness of our imminent demise is fascinating, but implementation was lacking for me.

[a l n · Rating 4 out of 5]

can really tell how much delight there is in these poems as elevated, sonically enriched ekphrastics of ordinary life—playful and witty in their ventriloquizing and scenic imagination, and with a deft ear capable of interpolating recognizable rhythms from songs somehow into poetic language itself…not something you read every day!

[Brooke Sanchez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won the physical copy of this book from Goodreads giveaways. A very quick read.

Wow some of these poems hit hard! Recommend if your a poetry reader or even interested in current/future events. This talks about almost everything, a few I didn’t understand however for the most part I enjoyed this read because it was almost like reading a black mirror episode on a few.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm never quite sure how to take poetry. some of this I liked, much was sort of ok. I did like the way they were grouped and you'd get shots of the pandemic or some other topic. on the whole I'd probably recommend?

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection. The way the words danced and spun together was melodic.

Thanks for the ARC

[Paul Deaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was engaging from beginning to end. It was a needed escape from a suboptimal society in which I find myself. I appreciate the varied forms of its poetry. Recommend.

[Angry.Sad.Motivated · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed some pieces more than others.

[Jimi Evans Remick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fav poems:

Conversation in Isolation
The Gap
Mermaid of Palmares

[H]

“On your way to the end of the earth, you cruise the garish boulevard” (56)

“No one and nothing/ touches me but this blue wind” (65)

[Courtney]

♥️

[Andreea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very witty collection, lots of word and sound play on various topics (sometimes too on the head) plaguing our modern world. A read that inspires contemplation.