Synopses & Reviews
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award. In Blowout, Denise Duhamel asks the same question that Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers asked back in 1954"Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" Duhamel's poems readily admit that she is a love-struck fool, but also embrace the "crazy wisdom" of the Fool of the Tarot deck and the fool as entertainer or jester. From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love through music, film, and historyMichelle and Barak Obama's inauguration and Cleopatra's ancient sex toy. Duhamel chronicles the perilous cruelties of love gone awry, but also reminds us of the compassion and transcendence in the aftermath. In "Having a Diet Coke with You," she asserts that "love poems are the most difficult poems to write / because each poem contains its opposite its loss / and that no matter how fierce the love of a couple / one of them will leave the other / if not through betrayal / then through death." Yet, in Blowout, Duhamel fiercely and foolishly embraces the poetry of love.
Review
“Denise Duhamel’s
Blowout chronicles the journey from heartbreak to new love but is so much more. It is a meditation on love and the sacrifices we make to create it in tenements, in condos, on boardwalks, and in our own hearts. Wearing her rare shade of Bali Brown lipstick, Duhamel strides through lovelorn streets like a Valkyrie, a straight-talking goddess, who takes on the teeming world and makes it her own.”
—Barbara Hamby
Review
“The discerning exuberance that has long defined Denise Duhamel’s work is distressed in
Blowout, but it is ultimately resilient. These poems traverse the distance between loss (the first poem is ‘How Will It End’) and praise (the last poem is ‘Ode to Eyebrows’) with the urgency of someone ‘trying to remember the exact wording of [her] fortune.’ Duhamel’s poems continue shouldering difficult, disorderly subjects with remarkable imagination and candor. She remains one of the best poets writing today.
Blowout is a devastating book.”
—Terrance Hayes
Review
“
Blowout is a terrific book of poems that delivers the pleasures of a good novel. Its protagonist is brave and resilient. She’s observant and curious about the world no matter what happens to her. She’s unsparing and hilarious. Whether wrenched by uncoupling, or catapulted back to childhood, or plummeting from fiscal cliffs, or shooting the rapids of postmodern romance, she is our hero. She never retreats, never turns bitter, gives everyone and everything (no matter how painful) its due, never losing eloquence or nerve. If I had a daughter old enough to read what a woman’s life really is, the glory and the comedy and the hell of it, I’d give her this book.”
—Amy Gerstler
Review
“Brims with Duhamel’s characteristic fixations—language (the British slang of ‘My New Chum’), poor or at least pathetic everyday behavior (losing hundreds between the ATM and her car), pop culture (movies, TV, eBay, pole dancing), unpleasant erotic memories (‘Kindergarten Boyfriend,’ ‘Or Whatever Your Final Destination May Be,’ ‘Victor’)—and still presents the miracle of how serious a life embedded in humdrum and commercialized reality can be. In fact, one poem in particular, ‘Worst Case Scenario’—a solid block of successive personal disasters—negatively apotheosizes just such embeddedness. It takes your breath away.”
—Booklist
Review
“Open this book, and you plunge into a maelstrom; Duhamel unspools line after long line about a bitter divorce and its aftermath. . . . While Duhamel leads us through the grubbiness of the breakup, the tone is more black comedy than self-pity. . . . A finely drawn if somewhat obsessive portrait for readers who like their poetry on the narrative side.”
—Library Journal
Review
“Duhamel is one of my favorite poets and one of the most captivating, comforting, challenging writers I have ever read. . . . ‘Blowout’ is as momentous, as staggering, as devastating and triumphant as the word implies.”
—The Iowa Review (Julie Marie Wade)
Review
“[A] knockout . . . Duhamel puts language on a taut highwire, gives it a spotlight, and makes it dazzle. . . . Throughout ‘Blowout,’ Duhamel simultaneously marries heartbreak to humor. The book is that rare and fabulous blend of conversational talk and burnished lyricism. There is a wisdom in ‘Blowout’ born from its talky gorgeousness. . . . Beauty is always risky, and with Duhamel at the wheel, it’s also always where we will be delivered. I’ll follow Duhamel anywhere she leads.”
—Florida Book Review
Review
“Duhamel’s poetry is admirable for so many reasons; she’s playful and wise and funny and heartbreaking all at once. What more do you want from poetry?”
—Chamber Four
Review
“I have rarely encountered a young poet whose work was so completely its own thing, was so little influenced by what trend might be elbowing itself forward on the writing campuses. Osman is a worldly and acutely sensitive writer who knows how to reach right through the sequined veil of fashion and put her hand squarely on the readers heart, with frank and candid expression, with unaffected wonder.”—from Ted Koosers preface to Ladan Osmans chapbook,
Ordinary Heaven
Review
“[Ladan Osman] writes out of a passion for language, out of a compelling pleasure and challenge in the potential of the voice to humanize us, or perhaps even better, to affirm our humanity. Osman is a warrior poet, and she is dangerous because she is especially gifted and disciplined about her craft, her technical facility with the poem. This collection offers numerous examples of this skillfulness.”—from the foreword by Kwame Dawes
Review
"In a world that too often plugs its ears to voices it thinks unworthy, Osman shows that it's actually more inappropriate to be decorous."—Kathleen Rooney, Chicago Tribune
Review
“True visionary poets are very rare. Ladan Osman is one. What she sees is extraordinary, and needful.”—Brigit Pegeen Kelly, author of Song and The Orchard
Synopsis
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award.
Blowout is both a celebration and mourning of romantic lovethe blowout of a party, as well as the sudden rupture of a front tire.
Synopsis
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony is based on a Somali insult: jiko muufo. Translated literally as “kitchen flatbread,” the insult criticizes those women who love domestic work so much that they happily watch bread rise. This collection of poems examines the varied ways women navigate gender roles, while examining praise for success within roles where imagination about female ability is limited. The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.
About the Author
Denise Duhamel is professor of English at Florida International University and the author of numerous poetry collections, including Ka-Ching, Two and Two, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. Duhamel has written five chapbooks of poetry and coedited, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. The recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including Penguin Academics: Contemporary American Poetry; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else; and Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Duhamel is guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013.