ABOUT THIS BOOK

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award.
In Blowout, Denise Duhamel asks the same question that Frankie Lyman & the Teenagers asked back in 1954—"Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" Duhamel's poems readily admit that she is a love-struck fool, but also embrace the "crazy wisdom" of the Fool of the Tarot deck and the fool as entertainer or jester. From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love through music, film, and history—Michelle and Barak Obama's inauguration and Cleopatra's ancient sex toy. Duhamel chronicles the perilous cruelties of love gone awry, but also reminds us of the compassion and transcendence in the aftermath. In "Having a Diet Coke with You," she asserts that "love poems are the most difficult poems to write / because each poem contains its opposite its loss / and that no matter how fierce the love of a couple / one of them will leave the other / if not through betrayal / then through death." Yet, in Blowout, Duhamel fiercely and foolishly embraces the poetry of love.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Denise Duhamel is professor of English at Florida International University and the author of numerous poetry collections, including Ka-Ching, Two and Two, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. Duhamel has written five chapbooks of poetry and coedited, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. The recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including Penguin Academics: Contemporary American Poetry; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else; and Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Duhamel is guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013.

REVIEWS

“Brims with Duhamel’s characteristic fixations—language (the British slang of ‘My New Chum’), poor or at least pathetic everyday behavior (losing hundreds between the ATM and her car), pop culture (movies, TV, eBay, pole dancing), unpleasant erotic memories (‘Kindergarten Boyfriend,’ ‘Or Whatever Your Final Destination May Be,’ ‘Victor’)—and still presents the miracle of how serious a life embedded in humdrum and commercialized reality can be. In fact, one poem in particular, ‘Worst Case Scenario’—a solid block of successive personal disasters—negatively apotheosizes just such embeddedness. It takes your breath away.”
—Booklist

“Open this book, and you plunge into a maelstrom; Duhamel unspools line after long line about a bitter divorce and its aftermath. . . . While Duhamel leads us through the grubbiness of the breakup, the tone is more black comedy than self-pity. . . . A finely drawn if somewhat obsessive portrait for readers who like their poetry on the narrative side.”

—Library Journal

“Denise Duhamel’s Blowout chronicles the journey from heartbreak to new love but is so much more. It is a meditation on love and the sacrifices we make to create it in tenements, in condos, on boardwalks, and in our own hearts. Wearing her rare shade of Bali Brown lipstick, Duhamel strides through lovelorn streets like a Valkyrie, a straight-talking goddess, who takes on the teeming world and makes it her own.”
—Barbara Hamby

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

One

How It Will End

Duper’s Delight

If You Really Want to

Madonna and Me

Mack

Tina and the Bruised Hearts

Takeout, 2008

Ritual

Recession Commandments

UNEMPLOYMENT

Heartburn

An Unmarried Woman

Two

Kindergarten Boyfriend

Fourth Grade Boyfriend

My Shortcut

Lower East Side Boyfriend

The Widow

Loaded

Cleopatra Invented the First Vibrator

My New Chum

A Different Story

You’re Looking at the Love Interest

Or Wherever Your Final Destination May Be

Courtship

Worst Case Scenario

And So

Old Love Poems

Expired

Three

Little Icaruses

Violenza Sessuale

My Strip Club

Victor

You Don’t Get to Tell Me What to Do Ever Again

Self-Portrait in Hydrogen Peroxide

Proposal

Ten Days before We Meet, I Dream You

I Read

Sleep Seeds

Having a Diet Coke with You

Ode to Your Eyebrows

Acknowledgments

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