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Tree Tall Woman
Slim tan colored, large novel size, in vg condition, dedication and author autograph inside front cover = very cool! We ship worldwide from San Francisco bay area.
- GenresPoetry
66 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1981
51 people want to read
About the author
Harryette Mullen
29 books105 followersHarryette 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 6, 2011
Just from reading the first poem, "To A Woman," I was IN LOVE with this book. The way that Harryette Mullen uses narrative and story in her poetry with Tree Tall Woman just pulled me in. I became enthralled by her stories of sisterhood, community and heritage. With all of this, there was a bit of a feminist slant, but it did not stunt the work, it enhanced it. The poem "Anatomy" was absolutely gorgeous and followed the route of a human life through a woman's body from the ovaries to the vagina. I found the way she wrote about the womb to be particularly beautiful:
3 The Womb
The warmest garment,
it grows like skin.
The most comfortable room,
it contains no furniture.
The easiest house,
it builds itself.
The most generous country,
where the climate’s always good.
Let the world go into
its womb again.
Turn out the lights,
enjoy the dark.
This depiction of the female body, its elevation to a higher status of beauty and the eloquence in which she does so is why I point to this feminist slant that a lot of her poetry throughout the book have. Again, it does not
A lot of the cultural descriptions she made really hit home with me, which was interesting considering that we grew up 40 years apart. But her poem "The Ritual of Earpiercing" was spot on. She wrote:
The girls' ears were pierced soon after birth,
like a kind of circumcision,
but I was one girl-child exempted from
the ritual of earpiercing.
I remember this experience as a child so vividly and perhaps this is what connects me to this book altogether. The experiences she illustrates so eloquently speak to mine and the way she does it never feels like a chore. It's quite enjoyable and reads with a sense of Blackness that I know not how to describe.
3 The Womb
The warmest garment,
it grows like skin.
The most comfortable room,
it contains no furniture.
The easiest house,
it builds itself.
The most generous country,
where the climate’s always good.
Let the world go into
its womb again.
Turn out the lights,
enjoy the dark.
This depiction of the female body, its elevation to a higher status of beauty and the eloquence in which she does so is why I point to this feminist slant that a lot of her poetry throughout the book have. Again, it does not
A lot of the cultural descriptions she made really hit home with me, which was interesting considering that we grew up 40 years apart. But her poem "The Ritual of Earpiercing" was spot on. She wrote:
The girls' ears were pierced soon after birth,
like a kind of circumcision,
but I was one girl-child exempted from
the ritual of earpiercing.
I remember this experience as a child so vividly and perhaps this is what connects me to this book altogether. The experiences she illustrates so eloquently speak to mine and the way she does it never feels like a chore. It's quite enjoyable and reads with a sense of Blackness that I know not how to describe.
December 6, 2021
This was my favorite of Mullen's collections so far. It's more personal than Urban Tumbleweed, with poems about her own life and culture. It feels more intimate because of this, but still easy and straightforward to understand for a non-poet such as myself. My favorite part of this collection was how it was organized... the links between the poems are there and make sense but it's not about just one thing, going from subject to subject. The pacing is loosely autobiographical too, with the early ones being about her childhood as she grows up alongside the poems to talking about issues of racism and sexism. I wondered why I gravitated back towards her work after disliking Recycolpedia so strongly... this has reminded me why I love Mullen's poetry when it's at its most lyrical. I will though say I didn't like the one about Persephone, just for having an interpretation of the myth that I don't agree with. Also the library copy I borrowed is printed on some gorgeous paper that looks like linen or papyrus, almost woven... I wish I had a copy to keep for myself!
"MY GRANDMOTHER
White men
opening doors
for her
was liberation"
"MY GRANDMOTHER
White men
opening doors
for her
was liberation"
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews