Soutine~A Poem
Dos Madres Press, 2012
More than a meditation on art and ambition, Soutine celebrates both painting and poetry, while lamenting the limits on our lives. Mullin uses words with such color and plasticity, such concern for the joys and failures of the flesh, that his poem feels like a world remade. —David Mason
Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle
Dos Madres Press, 2013
Darwin journeys on the Beagle, and Rick Mullin’s poetry, beautifully voicing its subject’s inner being, takes us along with him. The sonnet is a wonderful form, just right for this world-in-formation in the mind of a young naturalist. —Roald Hoffmann
Huncke: A Poem with Paintings
Second edition published by Exot Books, 2021
An epic narrative poem where time is a many-layered thing, Huncke is a world-in-a-poem, where its titular hero/anti-hero, inspiration and name-giver to the Beat Poets appears in many dimensions: in memory, in history, in the here-and-now, in poetry, in dialogue with "angels" and "ghosts", in holographic animations, in real and fictitious characters of every stripe, all contained within the constraints of a medieval form (ottava rima to the cognoscenti) that creates the sense of a forest or a feast of cantos winding their way, stoned-soul fashion, through haunted catacombs or buzzing "red-yellow" honeycombs, an underground world that all begins at a poetry reading attended by Mullin himself. —
Siham Karami
Stignatz and the User of Vicenza
Dos Madres Press, 2015
In Stignatz & the User of Vicenza, Rick Mullin displays his effortless formal mastery in poems that range from amorous meditation to tender cynicism and an illuminating openness before pop culture and high art. —Ned Balbo
Coelacanth
Dos Madres Press, 2013
Grounded by generous humor, graced with charming music, Rick Mullin’s latest collection, Coelacanth, mingles the modesty of a man “in need / of better shoes” with the regal bearing of the artist-as-hero, one gifted with “a formula for magic,” the last of an untamed, “legendary breed.” In a world gone “austere” and “ashen,” in an age when “mythology has reached a sorry pass,” we are comforted by Mullin’s poems, which share with the famous living-fossil fish of the book’s title the power to inspire wonder in things long since thought to have disappeared from the earth. —Ernest Hilbert
“Night” is the winner of the 2025 Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest
Poems Online
“Gravity”, “Aubade” at Bad Lillies
“Alba” at The New Criterion
“Still Life with Rose in a Crystal Vase” at Lavendar Review
“Clue” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse
“From the Bottom Up” at E Verse Radio
“Sutra” at Autum Sky Poetry Daily