reviewed by Paisley Conrad in Tripwire 22
In her 2013 collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, Harryette Mullen wonders: “Why accept what nature gave us? / We’re designing our own vegetables so / no regulator can make us eat broccoli” (92). This brief meditation on the genetic modification of vegetables is not simply a wry aside. Rather, it is a distillation of a broader tension in her work: the mechanics of consumption as a site where refusal and intervention collude and collide. Her opening question is less a query than a provocation; the technoscientific improvement on nature becomes indistinguishable from the impulse to dominate it.
Mullen’s language, often attuned to the absurd logics of bureaucratic and capitalist interventions, registers this doubleness: a refusal of coercion that loops back into a new form of submission, an autonomy that replicates the systems it aims to resist. This interest in the condensation of attention, and the representation of ephemerality in the wake of increasingly mediated relationships to ecology, technology, and each other continues in her most recent collection, the capacious Regaining Unconsciousness. Here, she considers the formal foreclosure of certain modes of life and address at the “eleventh hour” of impending climate catastrophe. Throughout, Mullen tracks a creeping sense of ecological crisis, rendered linguistically as a recognition that certain ways of knowing and speaking have already been precluded. The collection unfolds in eleven scopious sections, and the poems oscillate between spare, lyrical meditations and dense, bureaucratic blocks of prose—formats that mirror the discourses they engage, from the intimate rhythms of perception to colder, more impersonal registers of state power. This is a project to untangle the launching of a new “cold war,” a phrase that hovers like a fragment of found text, an errant signal cutting through the noise (32).
Throughout the collection, weather is equally subject and force, passing through as image and metaphor. In an early poem, “As I Wander Lonely in the Cloud,” Mullen reconfigures Wordsworth’s solitary lyric about glittering daffodils into a meditation on the digitization of consciousness, where wandering is indistinguishable from browsing, and memory is outsourced to the “vast, expanding, and indefinite” cloud (9). For Wordsworth, nature was a wellspring of recollection; for Mullen, memory is outsourced from the personal to the algorithmic. The daffodils remain, but only as an advertising prompt: “on my couch I multitask in pensive mood, opening my mail to find a discount coupon reminding me that nothing says spring like daffodils” (9).
This is not a Romantic ideal of transcendence, but a contemporary fog of data, mediation, and surveillance, where one’s innermost impulses are anticipated and formulated. Elsewhere in the collection, clouds are “whipped,” “bothering,” “evanescent,” “bleary,” “doubtful”—always in motion, shifting between states of presence and dissolution (10, 52, 58, 61). Imbricating sudden weather events alongside affective explosions, her speakers remain curtailed, confused. This is an exploration in dimensions of resignation, what it means to attend to foreclosure. But resignation is not passivity; it is an affective response to precarity, to the knowledge that certain futures have already receded. In “Bomb Cyclone,” the speaker reveals a fear of impending war: “If the climate turns against you, and weather declares war, then whether you wish it or not, you are forced to fight back” (32). Elsewhere, she turns to popular culture: Sharknado, the absurdist disaster film franchise, is recast as a parable of real estate speculation and environmental negligence: “Each wave brings another attack of the venture capitalist” (40).
If water is rising, so too is the demand for “concrete solutions,” a phrase Mullen bends from idiom to indictment in her poem “Concrete Steps” (102). “Emerging players making a racket,” she writes, “Calculating change, our capital execution awaiting the outcome of a trial sequester. Jurors out on ventures hedging captured assets. Facing hard decisions, taking concrete steps, even if we wade into deep murky water wearing cement shoes” (102). The question is not just whether the structures will endure, but what forms of life they will preserve or entomb. To be knocked unconscious is a condition of crisis, of impact; to regain unconsciousness is an act of mediation, of negotiating the limits of knowledge, of recognizing what remains resistant to translation, to solution, to synthesis.
If concrete marks the heavy weight of history, ice becomes its volatile counterpart. Her poem “Untranslatable Ice” offers a landscape of extremity and of suspended force:
That never melts
nor ever evaporates,
but holds keen steel.
Hugs extremes. Bites, stings,
rubs raw, rasping.
Weakens will.
Lies in wait for unsure step.
Aims a quiverful of shivers.
Gilds and glistens
what it kisses. Armored vault
of winter’s silver
hoarding insoluble
synonyms of snow. (29)
This ice neither melts nor evaporates; it refuses the transformations that would make it knowable within the logic of natural, seasonal change. And yet, it is not inert—it “holds keen steel,” a phrase that embeds the way ice can encase, trap, preserve, and suggests its own cutting edge, its unrealized capacity for violence. In its tight, short lines dragging down the margin, the poem wavers between stillness and motion, between a state of hoarding and a state of attack. It “hugs extremes,” a verb that is almost tender before it is severed by the next lines, where the ice no longer embraces but “bites, stings, rubs raw.” A language of predation enters the frame, as the ice does not simply exist; it waits, it lies in ambush, it aims. If there is any beauty here, it is a deceptive one, a gilding that glistens only to conceal its hoarding of “insoluble synonyms of snow.” This is the trap of the untranslatable—an illusion of endless equivalence, the suggestion that what is withheld is only another version of what has already been said. If the ground is ice, then the foot that steps forward does not know whether it will hold or slip. This is not stable grounding for conscious life. If untranslatable ice is a form that refuses to be assimilated, a structure that resists transformation, the unconscious, too, resists direct articulation. It is a latent site of hoarded and withheld meanings. To regain unconsciousness, then, is not simply to lapse into unawareness, but to inhabit a space of potentiality, of meanings that have not yet been forced into visibility. Mullen does not translate ice, or melt it into something fluid and manageable. Instead, her speaker makes the reader feel the friction of its refusal—the way it both reveals and withholds, like the structure of the unconscious itself.
This is not a book of easy answers, but of careful refusals, of a seasoned poet navigating the debris of meaning in search of something still mutable and unclaimed. In the titular poem, Mullen’s speaker turns over these possibilities:
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. (61)
What is it to “land on pointlessness”? To “restore blank looks”? Not to be consumed entirely, not to be annihilated, but to rest precariously and uneasily in a space where deep meaning has fled. Fruit shrivels, scars curdle, and flesh shrinks, and the decay she intimates here is no mere consequence: rather, it is the rhythm of time itself. A toast to the drought with dry martinis is neither an acceptance nor a critique; it is a kind of participation in the absurdity of a world where scarcity is commemorated in the language of leisure. Poetic mediation here is not a neutral process but a contested one: it determines what can be said, what remains latent, and what is forced into visibility. A process of regaining unconsciousness, then, might be to reclaim a mode of mediation that resists total capture, that holds onto the excesses and contradictions of experience rather than reducing them to coherence.
And what of these “doubtful clouds,” seeking their “carefree rainbows”? If clouds can doubt, then perhaps uncertainty is not exclusively a human condition. Mullen’s clouds hesitate, hold back, and temper the expectation that they can still, eventually, yield something beautiful. Mullen’s ecological consciousness operates in a similar register—she does not offer the possibility of redemption through nature, but rather a nature that is itself caught in these cycles of hesitation, resistance, and ironic reversals. Just as Mullen’s work interrogates what it means to move through a world that is always at the brink of collapse, Regaining Unconsciousness situates us in the aftermath of meaning, where survival is a repetition rather than a resolution. To recuperate the unconscious, to regain unconsciousness, is not to surrender, but to recognize that some truths, like untranslatable ice, remain irreducible. In the end, it is not certainty that Mullen offers, but the conditions for persistence—an attentiveness to the unfinished, to the unclaimed, to what might still be possible.
Paisley Conrad is a writer and critic based in Montréal.
Regaining Unconsciousness is published by Graywolf Press
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