In this chapter, I examine how poet Harryette MullenMullen, Harryette., in her work from the 1990s, looks both backward and forward in history to pose her ethical challenge to American consumer culture. In her works Muse & DrudgeMullen, Harryette.. (1995) and S*PeRM**K*TMullen, Harryette.. (1992), MullenMullen, Harryette. draws on nineteenth-century slave narratives to raise ethical questions about identity, consumption, and our relations to others. Likewise, I show how she draws on late twentieth-century advertisements, popular songs, marketing strategies, and consumer laws that reduce people, particularly African Americans, to commodities. Not merely analogizing consumerism to slaveryslavery., MullenMullen, Harryette.’s experiments with form, along with her delight in popular culture, insinuate a much more subtle and sophisticated view of our dependence on and desire for consumption. After all, MullenMullen, Harryette.—and all of us—are inescapably consumers, but MullenMullen, Harryette.’s reflexive construction of the (black) consumer as capitalismcapitalism.’s biggest victim also positions the (black) poet as its most well-positioned and able critic. Ultimately, the other-conscious black poet can point out that consumption destroys any sense of obligationobligation.see also responsibility. we might feel towards others, as if we were mere chattel, and poses an ethical not political problem for American capitalism. Her goal is to remind us of the othernessotherness.see also alterity. that obligates us even from the lyrics of songs, the pages of magazines, or the shelves of grocery stores.