Danielle Cadena Deulen’s recent poetry collection, Desire Museum, explores longing and the manyfold iterations in which it threads itself throughout experience and memory. Divided into four sections, each present overlapping versions of desire through finely articulated lenses. In an interview with New England Review, Deulen denotes the four sections with the first being “the psychological and political traps of desire,” followed by “a series of sapphic love poems that explores erotic love, female embodiment, and the transformative power of desire” in part two. The third section “centers on the climate crisis” and the fourth “meditates on grief and how to accept radical loss.” This collection can be described using the same language she employs in the interview to describe her conception of water: “as pure feeling: powerful, vulnerable, responsive, weighty, mutable, impossible to ignore.”
Danielle Cadena Deulen’s poetry and essays have appeared in numerous publications including Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and The Cincinnati Review. In addition to her latest collection, she’s published a memoir, The Riots, and two poetry collections, Lovely Asunder and Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, as well as a poetry chapbook, American Libretto. She is also the recipient of several literary awards including, Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and a 2022 Pushcart Prize, among other accolades.
Deulen’s work draws comparisons to Maggie Nelson and Ada Limón, capturing a similar directness slightly rounded with the softened edges of vulnerability. There is a refined immediacy to her writing, a sense of importance without the rush of urgency. Desire presents itself as melancholy yearning in some pieces, like the opening poem in part one, titled “Desire”: “smoke over your breathing body, / your cigarette burning orange-red in the room / we returned to, never spoke of. I’m standing / naked near the window, trying to silhouette / myself in your mind, to be something solid / you might promise yourself to.” In other moments, desire presents as confession, an exposure of yearning, as in “Another Romance”: “You leaned / your wind chime body from the / window, your long hair whipping / the side of the truck.” Still other iterations act as desire in terms of unfulfilled wanting, a discontent bleeding into regret for what once was and can no longer be.
This last conception of desire appears most poignant in the fourth section of the collection, specifically in one of the few long-form pieces, titled “Museum.” It’s dedicated to Erin James Staffel, a friend of Deulen’s who committed suicide, which she mentions in the interview with NER. The lyric spans five pages, and the top of a sixth, divided into six numbered sections. Similar in self-reflexiveness to writer and poet Ben Lerner, Deulen’s speaker writes of her initial attempts to draft the piece. There is a directness to her language, a transparency of feeling that speaks plainly to the facts of the situation: “Oddly, I’ve never started by announcing your suicide outright. Maybe a dual desire to tell and not tell?” The second section continues the reflection, relaying critiques received from early readers, one of which was the distracting quality of her tendency to editorialize. She goes on to explain, “That was in reference to a bare fact I didn’t even bother to dress up in metaphor: that you quit heroin when your first child was born, just before I met you, and that made you a hero in my mind.” Subsequently, she mentions the contrast between her father, who often drove drunk with her in the car, and her late friend, a comparison that begets the raw honesty of her inner thoughts. “Astral you, who landed when your daughter was born – I wrote in one draft – Something my father could never do, his love for me not outweighed by his vices.”
“Museum” continues in this way, with the speaker of the poem addressing the “you” that is her late friend, Erin, describing memories of visiting an art museum, the safety felt when she lived with his wife and family for a time, and a reckoning with the oscillation between anger and sadness that eventually come to fold into one another, the layered mess of grief. Ending the poem, the speaker recalls the message written on a postcard from the gift shop of the art museum, having carried it for many years, never getting around to the errand. Left aligned at the top of the page, taking up such a small amount of space that the page is mostly blank, she writes, “Dear Erin (I wrote on the plain side) Wish you were here.”
In an author’s note following the publication of her final poem, “Call,” published by Missouri Review in 2019, Deulen writes that this piece pulls inspiration from her experience reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In an effort to find the words her younger self needed in time of mental darkness, “Call” echoes the universal “you” so graciously present in Whitman’s work. It is gentle, open, and understanding, without judgment – a calling in rather than a calling out. The speaker talks of “a solid, immovable light” waiting “Even when the sidewalk’s grey / leads into your chest.” Again, demonstrating a controlled urgency, the speaker welcomes their fellow sufferers to “Step away from the edge / and turn toward me. I see you. I know that / ache in your chest means that you want to live.” With this closing, a calmness settles over the collection, the journey of desire in all its forms circling its arms around the reader, finding solace in the multitudes contained.
POETRY
Desire Museum
By Danielle Cadena Deulen
BOA Editions
Published October 10, 2023
Southern Review of Books 