Mortar - Softcover

"Sara Mumolo's "Mortar "is a book of action and reflection, of succinct dramatic moments. . . . The easy, lilting physical and metaphysical figures radiate a painterly, storybook quality that messes with the concision of Mumolo's diction, her unexpected puns." --Norma Cole, author, " To Be At Music" "By examining the ideology of their own careful phrasing, her poems reveal and revel in what it means for a citizen to belong simultaneously to a plurality of subject positions and symbolic systems. The surreal intersections of gender, nation, class, language and genre become, in her work, 'an activity / not an image, ' a subversive motile language that dares to 'disarm the most comfortable beliefs' and critique 'how the bourgeoisie believed in Desire.' With wry feminist humor and not a little ambivalence, her poems document the psychic costs of an economy that conflates sex and capital, the female nude and the courtesan." --Brian Teare, author, "Companion Grasses" "Remember the Athens, Georgia band Pylon? . . . Sara Mumolo has some of that band's jittery energy and something like their sound, which is to say the anxious, odd, and increasingly common sound of personal electronic devices rendering our insides almost entirely public." --Graham Foust, author, "A Mouth in California" Stitched Stapled Bound" This nude is planetary, heavy. Also, "what does the moon do" [the moon so often allied with the feminine] begs us to answer the question it poses. If I remember correctly from elementary school science classes, the moon reflects (light). Reflections make me think of mirrors, which do not show us what we really look like, but rather switch our left and right sides. [Hence, those of us with asymmetrical faces look slightly different in a mirror than we do in a photograph.] And yet despite this reflection, this illusion, we continue stubbornly as we are. "BOOMING," if you will. Mumolo's nude is claiming something back for herself. As a whole, these nudes reject their own commoditization even as they wonder just how possible it is to step out of the frame. The effect is eerie, ethereal.--Jenny Drai "Stitched Stapled Bound" (10/1/2013 12:00:00 AM) This nude is planetary, heavy. Also, -what does the moon do- [the moon so often allied with the feminine] begs us to answer the question it poses. If I remember correctly from elementary school science classes, the moon reflects (light). Reflections make me think of mirrors, which do not show us what we really look like, but rather switch our left and right sides. [Hence, those of us with asymmetrical faces look slightly different in a mirror than we do in a photograph.] And yet despite this reflection, this illusion, we continue stubbornly as we are. -BOOMING,- if you will. Mumolo's nude is claiming something back for herself. As a whole, these nudes reject their own commoditization even as they wonder just how possible it is to step out of the frame. The effect is eerie, ethereal.--Jenny Drai, Stitched Stapled Bound This nude is planetary, heavy. Also, what does the moon do [the moon so often allied with the feminine] begs us to answer the question it poses. If I remember correctly from elementary school science classes, the moon reflects (light). Reflections make me think of mirrors, which do not show us what we really look like, but rather switch our left and right sides. [Hence, those of us with asymmetrical faces look slightly different in a mirror than we do in a photograph.] And yet despite this reflection, this illusion, we continue stubbornly as we are. BOOMING, if you will. Mumolo s nude is claiming something back for herself. As a whole, these nudes reject their own commoditization even as they wonder just how possible it is to step out of the frame. The effect is eerie, ethereal. Jenny Drai, Stitched Stapled Bound"

Mortar is a text of stealth and volatility, of both explosive and empathic interactions. Just as the title connotes both the short smoothbore gun used by the military to wreak havoc, and the organic material made from cement, sand, lime and water that bonds the bricks of a cityscape together, so, too, do these poems offer both the emergency of society's destructive failings and the sometimes vexed sometimes confoundingly transformative emergence of intimacy between self and other. The fragments that construct these poems court grammar and turn from it, their slipperiness befits both the anxiety and ambivalence-the pleasure and the trap-of attempting to name the known, the knowable, and then to find oneself snared in the constructs that such knowing compels one to inhabit. Uneasy, vigilantly aware of the mire of awareness, these poems wrest from daily encounters of city life a contentious consciousness that can open, albeit explosively to each next instant.