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Sleeping with the Dictionary (Volume 4) (New California Poetry) by Harryette Romell Mullen is a work of literary fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Sleeping with the Dictionary (Volume 4) (New California Poetry) about?

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* seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the *American Heritage*, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group *Oulipo*, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation—which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"—also creates a kind of automatic poetic discou

Who reads Sleeping with the Dictionary (Volume 4) (New California Poetry)?

Author

Harryette Romell Mullen

Publisher

Berkeley: University of California Press

Published

2002

Language

EN

ISBN

9780520231436

Category

work of literary fiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Poetry, Humanities

Rating

3.99 / 5 (1,121 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14