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Pink Lady: Poems
When her mother agrees to enter a Rhode Island nursing home in December of 2019, Denise Duhamel promises she'll visit at least once a month. By March of 2020, everyone is in lockdown. The elegies in Pink Lady explore the resiliency of her elderly mother and nurses on the frontline, as well as the personal and universally experienced anxieties faced during pandemic policies. With focus, obsession, and even humor, Duhamel chronicles the separation of a mother and daughter, documenting the power of imagination, the aging body, and the limits of caregiving.
Book Details
- Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
- Publish Date: Jan 14th, 2025
- Pages: 88
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.13in - 0.29in - 0.35lb
- EAN: 9780822967361
- Categories: • American - General
About the Author
Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Her previous books include Second Story, Scald, Blowout, Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
More books by Denise Duhamel
Praise for this book
These clear-eyed poems gracefully bear witness to the end of a beloved parent's life: the indignities, role reversals, and moments of panic and tenderness. The whole crazy matrix of pain and unanticipated consolation is revealed with equanimity and deep emotional intelligence. The COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 US presidential election provide a backdrop and a sense of the political freefall, turmoil, and fear that dominated public life back then. Did I weep while reading this humane, bright-spirited, heart-rending memoir-in-poems? Yes!--Amy Gerstler, author of Scattered at Sea
Only Denise Duhamel could have written these poems. Pink Lady takes a common but often overlooked subject--the decline of an elderly parent--and finds in it all the meat of the human heart. Duhamel shares not just the painful moments but the intimate, the illuminating, and the joyful. And all along we have the humor of the speaker and her resilient mother who complains of the 'wackadoodle' in the White House and the COVID-induced absurdity that forces her nurses to suit up like astronauts. Forget Gideon's Bible; it's Pink Lady that should be in every hospital nightstand.--Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
In Pink Lady, a memoir in poems, Duhamel allows us to walk with her as she witnesses the steady decline of her mother's physical and cognitive abilities. When my own mother began this phase, I became wedged between crushing sadness and trying not to think about it, but of course, I was consumed by it. Duhamel composes a riveting portrait of her mother at life's close--and her mother becomes many mothers, perhaps all our aging mothers. At the same time, we recognize the speaker as someone whose efforts to cope might mirror our own in a similar situation. Poetry should help us bear what we cannot bear. With piercing empathy and surprising grace, these poems do that.----Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems
Written on the cusp and through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poems speak to the inconsistent movement of grief and memory when compounded by the events of the wider world.-- "Booklist"