Sara Mumolo appeared in Issue 31 with Four Poems from Brain in a vat: merely an artifact of the peculiar, The Bat Argument, More isolated segments, and syndrome or infant. The group moves through perception, bodily sensation, science, terror, weather, and the unstable evidence by which a mind decides what is real.
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Sara Mumolo in the historical archive
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Issue 31 published the four poems as a linked sequence. Their language borrows the pressure of philosophical argument and scientific explanation, then breaks those systems into fragments, questions, contradictions, and abrupt sensory images.
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merely an artifact of the peculiar
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The opening poem approaches pain through the problem of evidence. A bodily reaction can look persuasive from the outside while remaining inaccessible to another observer. The poem gives that familiar philosophical difficulty a deliberately clipped, unfinished surface.
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The Bat Argument
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The second poem widens the inquiry through terror, sunlight, science, organism, proof, safety, and fear. Statements arrive with the cadence of propositions, yet their relations keep shifting. Certainty becomes difficult to hold because every apparent conclusion opens another question.
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More isolated segments
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This section turns toward weather and perception. Synthetic horizons, wind, heat, dryness, and bodily response enter a language of systems and fragments. The poem treats atmosphere as something both physically experienced and conceptually assembled.
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syndrome or infant
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The final piece brings the sequence toward a void in understanding. Its compressed syntax leaves causes and conclusions partially suspended, giving uncertainty a formal presence. Across the four poems, the brain-in-a-vat problem becomes a method for testing how knowledge feels when its grounds keep moving.
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Issue 31 and contemporary poetry
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Mumolo’s sequence belongs to the wider field of contemporary poets represented by the historical archive, where philosophical vocabulary, ordinary speech, formal fragmentation, and lyric pressure often occupy the same page. The four poems turn that mixture into a concentrated inquiry about perception and proof.