Sleeping with the Dictionary

Harryette Mullen’s fifth poetry collection, ISleeping with the Dictionary, /Iis the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet’s most seductive writing partners, IRoget’s Thesaurus /Iand IThe American Heritage Dictionary. /IIn her mnage trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while IRoget /Ieems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the IAmerican Heritage, /Iwhatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen’s work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group IOulipo, /Ia dictionary game called S 7 or N 7. This method of textual transformation-which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s

Additional ISBNs: 9780520231436, 0520231430, 9780520927834, 0520927834