must

Poetry. Art. Women's Studies. Collaboration. Artwork by Mariela Yeregui. Mullin's poems are spare investigations into what it means to collaborate and to remember. They address what comes of the neurological, emotional, and social mandate that is both collaboration and memory, and in their brevity, offer small moments of singular present tense.

"Michaela Mullin's MUST is appropriately titled in every sense of the word—from the tender ironies and quiet insistences, to poems that create their own likely logic through her singular sensibility—this is a collection that should not be overlooked. While the poems often find their source in the intellect, the cleverness doesn't compromise their fervency. These are poems that resonate not only in the mind, but in the heart and the body as well."—Teri Youmans Grimm, author of Dirt Eaters

"Michaela Mullin's short poems offer pitch-perfect inflections of the multi-voiced conversations we hold in dialogue with not quite inanimate objects: art works, fairy tales, previous poetry. Each poem finds a way to interrupt itself—signaled sometimes through punctuation, and sometimes through words tumbling over each other—but quickly the intrusion enters into a discourse, generating a rhythm and creating a duet. Birds and wedding rings, a fugitive lost object, paintings, videos: Mullin conjures them forth in unexpected combinations and they move forward together, now a single entity. In her poetry, each new composite resonates clearly—but the affinity is only momentary; she dissolves these relationships just as quickly as they came together. But something new lingers, shifting the way we configure our world. The pleasure of the initial reading intensifies in re- reading."—Lenore Metrick- Chen, author of Collecting Objects/Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and American Visual Culture, 1830-1900

"Michaela Mullin's poems mesmerize. With a light but sure touch she moves from childhood reveries to her adult fascinations... The aphoristic poems in must combine heart and mind with determination and playfulness."—Steve Langan, author of Meet Me at the Happy Bar