A selection of poetry by Denise Duhamel, in which she suffers postmodernist angst when using the therapeutic I. The volume features poems from Duhamel's five previous collections, which include Smile , The Star-Spangled Banner and Girl Soldier.

Reliably sharp and entertaining. Duhamel's knack for blending tones--especially the personal and sociological, the ludicrous and the horrifying, the silly and the pathetic--gives poem after poem its distinctive and unforgettable character.
--ALA Booklist, starred review

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award.
In Blowout, Denise Duhamel asks the same question that Frankie Lyman & 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...

When her -smart- phone keeps asking her to autocorrect her name to Denise Richards, Denise Duhamel begins a journey that takes on celebrity, sex, reproduction, and religion with her characteristic wit and insight. The poems in Scald engage feminism in two ways--committing to and battling with--various principles and beliefs. Duhamel wrestles with foremothers and visionaries Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly as well as with pop culture figures such as Helen Reddy, Cyndi Lauper, and Bikini Kill. In dialogue with artists and writers such as Catherine Opie, Susan Faludi,...

When her Florida apartment is damaged by the ferocity of Hurricane Irma, Duhamel turns to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem "Terza Irma." Throughout the book she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, hyperaware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. She writes odes to her favorite uncle - who was "green" before it was a hashtag - and Mother Nature via a retro margarine commercial. She writes letters to her failing memory as well as to America's amnesia. With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second...