Sleeping With the Dictionary
"Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's thesaurus and the American Heritage dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget's seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determined alphabetical arrangement, its pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), and its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play."--Cover.