Queen for a Day: Selected And New Poems

Denise Duhamel

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There's no predicting a Denise Duhamel poem, except that it might be about something you've never seen in a poem before: Mr. Donut, Rodney King, or nude beaches; Gertrude Stein, phone sex, or the Girl Scouts. Poems from The Woman with Two Vaginas, a book that was censored when it first appeared, are based on Inuit folklore. How the Sky Fell offers revisionist fairy tales, and the poems from Kinky are inspired by Barbie dolls. In her new work, Duhamel suffers postmodern angst when using the "therapeutic I." Denise Duhamel has startled readers of American poetry with work that pirouettes on a tightrope above the personal and the political, the spoken word and the page, the irreverent and the sacred. Queen for a Day showcases poems from her five previous collections, along with new work.

Book Details

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publish Date: Feb 22nd, 2001
Pages: 120
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.75in - 6.13in - 0.31in - 0.34lb
EAN: 9780822957621
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.

Praise for this book

I have the pleasure of knowing Denise Duhamel, and I have the pleasure of being familiar with many of the contexts in many of her poems. But her poems are almost always -- and delightfully so -- feel fictive to me. Their tones and slants enter materials in unsuspecting ways. But I think the poems feel fictive for me mainly because they are so authentic. They dream. They politicize. They create possibilities which make me want to read and write and live. That the poems often make me laugh or wonder is pure gravity.-- "Michael Burkhard"

Denise Duhamel'spoems are kinkyshe's like a girlsoldier some days a womanwith two vaginas on othersI like the way she belts out"The Star Spangled Banner"at the ballpark heraffectionate embraceof the world'sfull of grace(though the worlditself is not)and her titles dowhat titles should dothey make youwant to readthey texts they head-- "David Lehman"

Denise Duhamel's Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems engagingly charts her evolution as a fictionist -- from ribald, bemused poems about body parts and coming of age dramas to increasingly sophisticated mock-narratives. Her work is tremendous fun, but often there's an underpinning of sadness in it as well, which keeps the poems from being mere play. You'll want to read parts of this book aloud to your smart friends. Or to give it as a gift.-- "Stephen Dunn"

Denise Duhamel is a red-headed, red-lipped wild woman, a human and humane poet who isn't afraid to tackle any subject: violence, racism, A.I.D.S., bulimia, childishness, the myth of Bluebeard, the phenomenon of Barbie, . It's been a singular joy to red this "selected" and see Duhamel's work grow and develop over the years. Queen for a Day is exuberant, brazen, bold, honest as hell, audaciously unpretentious and outrageously self-referential, a Frank O'Hara meets Lucille Ball meets Sandra Bernhard of a book: sin verguenza!-- "Dorianne Laux"

Duhamel is an entertainer, as her new, retrospective collection confirms. . . . Throughout the book, each poem is utterly engaging, as hard to abandon as a chapter in a taut thriller.-- "Booklist"

Celebrates ideas and topics that aren't often the subect of bards and poets. Her playful, inventive way of string together ideas is evident... Despite the frolicsome nature of much of her work, Duhamel writes incisively about serious themes and issues. The clash between high and low art never seems abraisive in Duhamel's work.-- "Tribune Review"

It is not difficult, now that they've gathered in one place, to see Duhamel's oeuvre as more than wry individual takes on random subjects; she is a subtle and effective political poet, one who continually challeneges societal expectations of women and girls--clearly, restlessly, and not without wit.-- "ForeWord Magazine"

From the strange, complex materials of our society, the poet develops stories and meditations that reveal the distortions and energies of pop-culture. Duhamel's poetry takes its humor seriously and its gravity lightly.-- "Poet Lore"

Duhamel writes about Garcia-Lorca's Deli, Georgia O'Keefe's pelvis, a Barbie Doll in a Twelve-Step Program, Barbie as a Bisexual, Barbie's GYN appointment, and the difference between Pepsi and the Pope. . . . If you like knee-slapping, quasi-existential poetry, go out and pick up a Queen for a Day.-- "RALPH"

Somewhere between Sex and the City, Sharon Olds and Spalding Grey lies the poetry of Denise Duhamel, who in six volumes during the 1990s (all from small independent or small university presses) established herself as a vivacious, sarcastic, uninhibited and sometimes sex-obsessed observer of contemporary culture. Long fascinated by downtown New York, Duhamel got poetic mileage from her once-rough neighborhoods. Now she lives and teaches in Miami: this new-and-selected sums up her NYC years . . . Its humor, anger and forceful personality could make the book a genuine popular hit.-- "Publishers Weekly"