Reading Groups: Laura Mullen's Complicated Grief

Dear Readers,

Guided Poetry Book Groups are my new offering: facilitated sessions for committed poetry readers and writers who wish to engage in a practice of reading more deeply, creatively, and intentionally. 

Each month, I guide small groups through a close reading of a current book of poetry—books that are overlooked and underrated; books that have something important to tell us about what it is to be alive today.

This brief post is a catalyst for discussion for Laura Mullen’s Complicated Grief. This thread is a place for members of the reading group to answer the questions I’ve posed and to pose questions of their own. And though it’s intended for members of the reading group, I welcome comments from anyone committed to a deeper, more intentional reading of this important book.

I’m including a few reflections below to kick us off.

I’m going to announce the next round of reading groups in late October. Send me an email if you’d like to be notified when registration opens for the January 2023 cycle.

Sean

Discussion Prompts: Laura Mullen’s Complicated Grief

1. What happens when we insist that people fit our expectations? Or when we have cut out of our lives or our writing to make it fit what others expected to find?  

2. How does the book treat “canon-as-trauma,” the damaging phenomenon that we don’t ask boys and young men to read a canon that is more female?

3. Mullen writes about the “monstrous being.” Is it possible to embrace or reject the “monstrousness” of aging, particularly the aging that women (and not men) experience?  

4. How does the book deal with what is sometimes called the “male gaze,” or being looked at not as a person, but as prey?

5. How does Mullen use language to move the past, a wilderness of horrors, into a present moment where it can be expressed and dealt with clearly?

6. How does the book use the story and monster of Frankenstein? Mary Shelley, whose presence begins the book, wrote about a monster who was constructed from pieces of cadavers, presumably retrieved as they were in the 18th century as they are today: from corpses used for medical research. Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of sepsis in 1797 just 10 or 11 days after giving birth to Mary Shelley. How does Mullen use Shelley’s story in her own?