Denise Duhamel

The Best American Poetry: 2013 edited by David Lehman is a latest in the Scribner Best American Poetry series that has been running since 1989. Lehman is also the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the author of several books of poetry. He teaches at The New School in New York City. Denise Duhamel is the guest editor of this series who writes the introduction. She is the author of several volumes of poetry.

Lehman writes the forward and it carries a Shelley theme. Duhamel has a lighter approach and opens with “If you are reading this you are not dead” in response to the Mayan Calendar and the end of the world in December 2012. For those who think poetry is not for them or that poets are all uptight and overly “sensitive.” Duhamel early on tells the reader that the first three poems have the word “f*ck” in them and two of those three poems also have the word mayonnaise. That should intrigue the non-poetry readers. Her introduction alone makes me want to find her books of poetry and and move them to the top of my reading list.

Some of the poems are moving like “Pachyderm,” about a boy with the paraplegic father (Vietnam) who loses his brother to an IED in Iraq. “Death” is moving and eerie. There is humor, or more so critique, of America is in the “Statue of Responsibility” and “All American.” There is even a poem mocking George Bush's changed heart. 'The Art of Drinking Tea” is a pretty amazing poem in itself and displays the the difference between the sexes version of enlightenment. “New Jersey Poem” is a powerful poem, one of two dealing with suicide. Some poems are moving in their support of the art itself like “Why I Write Poetry.” “What's so funny about racism/ is how racists never get the joke” begins the poem “Blazing Saddles” and yes it is about the movie. The reader will get more than a subtle hint from the timely poem “Syria.” There is something for everyone in this collection. “The kind of Man I Am At the DMV” was one I could relate to. Having to keep my hair in a pony tail at work, a child once yell out to his father, “That man has girl's hair and a pink rubber band in it.” You can't explain to children that men can have long hair, especially in Dallas. It's even more difficult to explain that the hair bands come in a variety pack and yes, one of the colors is pink, and it means nothing more than that.

The Best American Poetry has something for everyone and more than likely a lot for most. Poetry ranges from verse to almost prose in paragraph form. If you don't like poetry you'll like this collection because it will show you that poetry is much more than “An Ode on a Grecian Urn” or rhyming couplets. This collection is also current to out present culture and easy to relate to. If you like great poetry or are a bit shy of it, this book is perfect for you.… (más)

There's no question that the star of this collection is Duhamel's long 9-11 poem, "Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted". From start to finish, this 25-page poem is powerful and seemingly effortless, juxtaposing the personal against the media against the political, and bringing separate voices together in a way that makes the poem literally ring from the page. This poem, honestly, made the collection worth reading.

But, this said... there weren't many poems here that I enjoyed besides this hallmark piece. Too many of them felt more like unedited exercises or wandering rants, and while most all of them had some interesting language moments, there just wasn't enough for me to enjoy reading them on any level.

If you're a poetry lover, I'd absolutely recommend looking up the long poem here--especially if you're interested in long poems (although, the sections in this one are so short that it doesn't read like the average long poem), though I'm afraid I can't recommend the collection as a whole.… (más)

When I began reading this collection, I found myself sucked completely into the world of each poem--I found pleasure and surprise and admiration, and something to think about. And then I read the next few sections, which I found a bit flat...but that was okay, as I was still on a high from that first section, looking forward to what would come next. And then the next few sections were overly crude, and a bit boring, followed by one interesting poem...followed by sections full of poems weighted down by self-conscious name-dropping and diary-entry-sounding poems that read more like notations of ideas or emails than fully wrought and considered poems.

So, overall, the book was sincerely disappointing. By the end, I felt more like I was reading the author's correspondence, unfiltered, than a book of poems meant for a reader who doesn't know her personally, or care who she knows, so much as they would care about her work and what she had to say. It may be that I'll pick up the first book poems were excerpted from here, written in 1993, though I don't think that's the one already on my shelf. And/or, perhaps I'll read that one, or perhaps I won't.

As I said, by the end, this was more and more disappointing, I'm afraid. Not something I'd recommend, though I know I've enjoyed some of her works in the past, and I did enjoy some of those first few. They didn't make up for the whole of the book, though, simply enough.… (más)