Complicated Grief by Laura Mullen

November 5, 2015120 pages / Cover art by Joan TannerISBN-13 978-0-9844142-8-4 In a way (the way I’m taking it) Laura Mullen’s Complicated Grief follows (with giant dropouts) everything she knows about being a monster. Her aegis covers women (young ones and aging), un­natural disasters and literature. If something packed could wander like Julianne Moore’s mind, to the benefit of everyone, but more like a whole department store or a library feeling snarky, shuffled itself and somehow it was wise. —Eileen Myles From the Internet, I learn that "complicated grief" designates a bereavement disorder in which, instead of fading with time, the pain of loss remains as acute as it was in the beginning. But from Laura Mullen’s book I learn that complicated grief also names something else: not a sufferer’s excruciating condition, but a writer’s exhilarating achievement. Here, the incapacity to move on from "old" psychic scenarios has been itself complicated by a formidable prose that not only refu