Denise Duhamel’s Scald (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
deploys that casual-Friday
Duhamel diction so effortlessly
a reader might think heck,
I could write like that,
but then the dazzling leaps
and forms begin—
“Snake Pantoum,” “Conceptual Villanelle”—
and Duhamel’s sentences
don’t even break a sweat,
sailing on with her trademark mix
of irony, grrrl power, and low-key technical virtuosity,
like if Frank O’Hara, Carrie Brownstein,
and Elizabeth Bishop had a baby.
Scald recklessly excavates
the late twentieth century,
dedicating its three sections
to Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin,
and Mary Daly, a combo
that could be deadly (preachy, passé)
but is, in fact, great;
a poem like “Fornicating”
starts the Dworkin section
imagining “unmet desires”
and absurd anonymous hookups,
ultimately complicating Dworkin’s
infamous anti-het-sex stance
without scorning it. That’s key:
Duhamel asks her readers to picture
these now-dead women
as part of an evolving conversation.
Still, Duhamel’s hardcore
fans, who recall the witty immediacy
of the Barbie poems in Kinky (1997),
might prefer Scald when it tackles
the near–present tense,
as in “Extreme Villanelle,” which starts:
“Our drones, called Predator and Reaper, /
have killed at least four hundred civilians /
as they wiped out extremists,
life cheaper // in the Middle East.”
What, she asks, counts as extremist?
Us? Them? Labels are too easy.
In “How Deep It Goes”
Duhamel claims to hate the phrase
“having it both ways,” because “men
always have it both ways,”
but her poems are too concrete,
too embodied to resolve
into the political binaries of the 1970s
or 90s or now. Even when Duhamel
samples nonfictional texts
her words are not mirrors or lamps
but doors, opening both ways,
between actual and possible worlds.
In “On the Occasion of Typing My First
Email on a Brand-New Phone,”
Duhamel writes, “When I sign ‘Denise’ /
autocorrect suggests Denise Richards /
which makes my ex-husband Charlie Sheen…”
as if the wrong word could disrupt
a person’s whole self, as indeed it can.
When I type my name,
“Angela” autocorrects to “Angela Merkel,”
Chancellor of Germany,
but the error is fixable,
fortunately, since I’d prefer
to skip the Group of Seven summit,
and instead applaud Scald,
a book that displays Duhamel’s
signature verve while adding a layer
of retrospective melancholy,
as befits a poet at midlife,
especially one still reeling from Charlie Sheen’s
drug-fueled and insensitive behavior.
November 2017
This review was published in Issue 61:1.