Overview

"Consumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied. Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. These poems trace the pleasures and pitfalls of sex, the anxieties of motherhood, and the ramifications of interpersonal, sociopolitical, and environmental trauma in women's lives. In these pages, Deulen holds up a candle to desire itself, questioning what it means to recognize and embrace one's desires, or what it might mean to let them go. In conversation with Hopkins, Keats, Crane, and Lorca, Deulen seamlessly weaves memories into dreamscapes and blurs the human and natural worlds. With love, wonder, grief, and awe, Desire Museum shows us that to live alongside desire is to refuse to be contained: ""I refuse meaning [ ] the first sunrise reiterates the last."""

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9781960145000

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Reviews

Praise for Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us (2015) Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize Danielle Deulen borrows the title of Montaigne's essay for her extraordinary poetry book Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us. Both philosophical and anecdotal, Deulen's poems are slippery pronouncements of our ever-allusive present which is co-opted by nostalgia for our past ancestor utterly naked, rock damp beneath her bare feet and anxiety for our future in which we will find we were not, after all, human. Infused with psychology and cinema, Deulen's work reads like poetry verite. Fiercely intelligent and unpretentiously profound, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a thoroughly compelling book. --Denise Duhamel, Contest Judge The touchstones of Danielle Cadena Deulen's superb new collection are nothing less than the great philosophers of the Western canon, ranging from the pre-Socratics to Helene Cixous. Yet her pensees, troubled meditations and edgy but graceful lyrics are too searching and honest to look to these sources for consolation. Instead, these are poems which remind us of what William Matthews saw as one of the core functions of poetry--its recognition of 'the need of experience to resist resolution into knowledge.' Deulen's poems are as impassioned as they are intelligent, as elegant as they are unflinching. Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a book of sustained and haunting power. -- David Wojahn The poems of Danielle Deulen's Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us are as superbly ambitious as they are fiercely intimate - and those things require each other here. And so they are lyric in the rightest sense, shaped by an intuitive, associative logic - as in the title poem, where secrets of ancient mathematicians, mothers drinking gin from Solo cups, recollections of a coming-of-age friendship, and the knotweed and bronze hills of eastern Oregon all gather into a chorus about order and irrationality and hurt. Whether looking through Lacan at a child's split reflection in a carousel mirror, or careening through a litany of daily human catastrophes we bring about because (perhaps a paradox of privilege) we are bored, these poems never just intellectually astound - they also burn. -- Rebecca Lindenberg Praise for The Riots (University of Georgia Press, 2011) Winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award There are moments of transcendent prose in this manuscript that elevate it far beyond what we might expect of it at first blush. It manages to become more profound, and more beautiful, the more desperate and tragic its trajectory. Finally, it is a triumph of wisdom and great art. --Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North Fierce, tender, explosively honest, Danielle Cadena Deulen's radiant debut sings like a prose poem and lingers like a fever dream. In the liminal world of The Riots, the face of a dead girl under the bridge worries a hole in your mind though you never see her, mercy shatters trust, and a boy's stuttering confession of love exposes his sister's crimes against him. Through the grace and devastation of shared memory, Deulen dares to know the dispossessed, to re-invent her father's life and try to save him as a child. She remembers what cannot be, transfiguring herself through the passion of desire. --Melanie Rae Thon, author of In This Light There is general agreement that adverse childhood experiences leave permanent scars, but with a person as gifted as Danielle Cadena Deulen, the result is transformative for writer and reader alike...Deulen poignantly and poetically relates the effects such experiences had on her, her family, and those around her. It is a sad, but beautiful, and, ultimately uplifting compilation. --ForeWord Reviews The Riots is rooted firmly in that world of hurt, mired in the struggle to understand and accept the past, and to do so--crucially--without being defeated by the onslaught of negative memory. --Diagram

Author Information

"Danielle Cadena Deulen is a writer, professor, and podcaster. Originally from the Northwest, she now lives in Atlanta where she teaches for the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University. Her previous collections includeOur Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, winner of the Barrow Street Book Contest andLovely Asunder, which won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir,The Riots, won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. She has been the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including ThePushcart PrizeXLVI,Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, andPoets.org. She is the host of ""Lit from the Basement,"" a literary podcast and radio show."

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