Desire Museum

(Paperback)

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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 womens 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.

Reviews

Desire Museum is all that is delicious about poetrysmall windows through which the fresh breath of self-knowledge blows through, the mouthfeel of deft language, the eros of travel. But this collection is also astonishing in how it builds mythologies around dissolution, ardor, and allusion. I have loved wandering in the halls of this books illuminating galleries and Deulens deft curation.

Carmen Gimnez, author of Be Recorder

Drawing on sources from classical mythology to particle physics, these poems render lost loves and lost letters, abandoned places and selves. Beasts abounda fox, a tiger, an octopus, a cow. There are sleepless nights and regretful kisses, the voices of Keats and Hopkins, Lorca, and Crane. All along, Deulen confronts ardors ghosts, interrogating the myriad ways hunger and heartbreak get transmuted into art and memory. Sometimes funny, always smart, endlessly inventive, Desire Museum is a restless and intoxicating book!

Bruce Snider, author of Fruit

Danielle Cadena Deulens luminous collection Desire Museum assembles and remixes the past, constructing not pristine displays under glass to be admired at a distance, but dynamic exhibits that shimmer beneath our hands. How many selves can one life contain What remains after great loss At once dreamlike and insistently clear, these poems call across time and space, inviting former lovers, canonical poets, and the ghosts of former selves to commingle in an ever-shifting present. This is a book to read and remember.

Chelsea Rathburn, Georgia Poet Laureate, author of Still Life with Mother and Knife

Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize

Danielle Deulen borrows the title of Montaignes essay for her extraordinary poetry book Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us. Both philosophical and anecdotal, Deulens 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, Deulens work reads like poetry vrit. 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 Deulens superb new collection are nothing less than the great philosophers of the Western canon, ranging from the pre-Socratics to Hlne Cixous. Yet her penses, 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 poetryits recognition of 'the need of experience to resist resolution into knowledge.' Deulens 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 Deulens 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 childs 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 Deulens 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 boys stuttering confession of love exposes his sisters crimes against him. Through the grace and devastation of shared memory, Deulen dares to know the dispossessed, to re-invent her fathers 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 socruciallywithout being defeated by the onslaught of negative memory."

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Author Bio

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.