EtC.

Our history begins with the present, a gap, “the ‘spread,'” the gate that won’t fully shut. The lacuna isn’t to be filled with presence but lets rage sing the poems in EtC. Laura Mullen plays with citation and reliability, with versions of history and memory, and with the libidinal energy of remembering not encased in individual experience but residing in language: our Cow [Memory] Palace. “Milk milk milk milkmilkmilk.” Or, simply: “eeeeeee.” With vocal cords opened by a cry of vowels—that phoneme that most directly reaches the gods—Mullen releases poems that embody the poem’s more impossible forms and functions. —Kimberly Alidio