Danielle Cadena Deulen, Desire Museum

 

LAKE BOX

How these days will arrive to us later,
later—in a subscription box full of grit and
loamy water, tadpole eggs and a thin skin
of algae—after all the real lakes have dried
up, so we might consider how rare they
are, how fine. The eyes of the world forever
closed, we’ll say, paying to walk circles
around the puddle we’ve poured at the
center of our rooms, where we walk with
linked arms, the call of nightbirds and
insects and wind through the reeds singing
from our speakers, where we will undress
and lay in the shallows, the moonlight
barely reaching through the windows to
the circles widening in the water from the
dropped stone at the center of our minds.

The first I’ve seen by Atlanta, Georgia-based poet, professor and podcaster Danielle Cadena Deulen, following The Riots (University of Georgia Press, 2011), Lovely Asunder (University of Arkansas Press, 2011) and Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us (Barrow Street Press, 2015), is Desire Museum (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023), a curious collection of lyrics set as a suite or sequence of subject-based studies. As the back cover offers, Desire Museum is “shaped by female-identified embodiment,” and “touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border.” Set in four numbered sections of lyric narrative poems, I’m intrigued by the variety of lyric structures she utilizes to shape her pieces, from the prose block to poems that focus on staggered phrases and line breaks, simultaneously focused on the whole unit as well as the lyric sentence, pause and prose line. Her museum holds a menagerie, held together as a singular unit through deep attention and an unflinching gaze. At times, her lines are absolutely devastating. “I used to walk through cities / with thighs so taut men would bless me as I went,” she writes, as part of the poem “SELF-DOUBT WITH INVISIBLE TIGER,” “the thin layer of oil on my cheeks seen as a pretty / sheen. Even then, I knew what they wanted most / was my silence.” Her poems are absolutely sharp, and I’m fascinated by the way she aims her gaze at a subject, and unfurls across the length and breadth of her examinations, providing both meditation and commentary in stunning fashion.