Twelve years is a long time to wait for a new collection from one of American poetry's most distinctively inventive voices. Harryette Mullen, whose Sleeping with the Dictionary was a National Book Award finalist and whose Recyclopedia gathered three earlier collections of formally dazzling, politically alert work, returns with Regaining Unconsciousness — and the wait, it turns out, has been entirely justified. This is a book of alarms, but it is an alarm you want to hear.
The return
Mullen has always worked at the intersection of language play and social critique, and this collection continues that work while tightening both. Where some poets who've waited long between books produce something tentative — as if unsure whether the practice still holds — Mullen returns with unusual sureness. The collection feels simultaneously new and fully continuous with what she has always done: make language do political work without losing any of its pleasure.
Eleven sections, eleven hours
The collection is organized into eleven taut sections, and the number is not accidental — Mullen explicitly casts these as poems written in the eleventh hour. The subjects are climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of the oceans, and the corrosive effects of individualism on collective life. These are not, in other hands, the ingredients of poems you'd want to spend time with. In Mullen's hands, they are.
Mullen imagines the apocalypse with playfulness and wry referentiality — an astounding feat in poetry this politically explicit and this formally exact.
The structural conceit of the book — eleven sections, eleventh hour, the implication that we are running out of time — creates a cumulative pressure that the poems individually resist through humor and formal energy. This productive tension between the gravity of the subject matter and the lightness of the treatment is Mullen's signature, and it is on full display here.
Language as resistance
What distinguishes Mullen from poets who write similarly explicit political content is her understanding that language itself is the site of political struggle. She doesn't simply say true things about the world — she makes the mechanisms of language visible, stretches and distorts and recombines syntax in ways that implicate the reader in the structures being critiqued. Reading her is an active experience. You can't just receive the message; you have to participate in its construction.
The AI poems are particularly sharp in this regard. Mullen turns the language of machine learning back on itself with a satirical precision that most poets attempting to address AI have not managed — the work feels genuinely thought rather than topically assembled.
The problem of buoyancy
One honest reservation: the collection's characteristic buoyancy occasionally works against its declared urgency. When every alarm comes with a wink, the cumulative effect can feel slightly anaesthetising — you leave some poems more amused than shaken. This is a tension intrinsic to Mullen's method rather than a failure of execution, but it is worth naming. The book wants to wake us up and delights in doing so with wit; now and then the wit softens the blow it intends to land.
Final verdict
Regaining Unconsciousness is exactly what the moment needed and exactly what Mullen alone could have written. Twelve years between books and not a step missed. The collection is a model of how to write political poetry that remains, above all, poetry — rigorous in its formal intelligence, alive in its language, genuinely surprising even when its subjects are the most predictable of our collective anxieties. Read it.
