Danielle Cadena Deulen is a writer, professor, and podcaster. Originally from the Northwest, she now lives in Atlanta where she teaches for the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University. Her previous collections include Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, winner of the Barrow Street Book Contest and Lovely Asunder, which won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir, The Riots, won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize XLVI, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Poets.org. She is the host of "Lit from the Basement,” a literary podcast and radio show.
Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Desire Museum examines desire, longing, lost love, and lesbian relationships alongside a world devastated by climate change and human rights violations. Both personal and universal, these poems explore the various traumas permeating women’s lives. However, in Deulen’s verses, passion, romance, and desire are healing forces that help the poems’ speaker reconcile with the past and an uncertain present.
Poems like “The Sirens” offer readers a defiance and determination to love unabashedly and pursue passion wildly—whether or not anyone else understands. Helping form the poem’s passionate tone is its brief form and minimalist, direct language. The poem opens with the bold observation “From here you sound like wounded dogs / wailing to the sea.” This observation segues into the command, “Don’t change course. Don’t swim out to us.” In these lines, the speaker’s defiance towards those who seemingly do not understand them is resolute, and the tone leads readers to believe that they do not want to be understood or accepted by the implied “you.” Empowering the poem even more is the speaker’s usage of the collective pronoun “We” in the third and final stanza: “We sing for each other. What you have heard / was never meant for you at all.” The closing oozes with passion, and the final clause “was never meant for you at all” is a firm boundary further separating the speaker from those who do not accept them.
A similar passion brews in “Aura.” Physical and emotional desire swirl in Deulen’s carefully constructed lines. Elements like vapor and smoke meld with tangible elements like pine and violets in the first stanza, where the emotional and the physical elegantly collide. The third line, punctuated with a colon, acts as a figurative cliff from which the reader leaps into the rest of the poem. Em dashes in the second stanza emphasize the pronoun “you,” introducing readers to the speaker’s object of affection. In the third stanza, clever phrases like “neuronal / networks” create a sonic fusion that echoes the metaphorical leap readers made in the first stanza, and the poem forms even more magic as the poem continues and Deulen continues a majestic blanket of word play. The passion culminates in the final stanza: “like a river & I’m a stone wetted by / the mere thought of you: fever-mist that / takes me shaking, makes me bright,” and it is the implied positive transformation that clinches it, seals it, and makes its status as a devotional poem final.
In “Lake Box,” Deulen uses a compressed, boxed form to capture an environmental sentiment that resonates with great fictional works such as the novel Briefly Very Beautiful. The poem opens with the contemplative, rhetorical idea “How these days will arrive to us later, / later.” As the poem continues, the speaker speculates about a world in which “all the real lakes have dried / up” and the “eyes of the world forever / closed.” Nonetheless, the poem is as much about finding solace in another as the apocalypse unfolds as it is about the irreversible damage humanity has rendered onto the environment and its inhabitants. Again, the passion evident in “Aura” emerges in “Lake Box” as the speaker and another “will undress / and lay in the shadows.” The physicality of two humans engaged in an intimate moment blurs with the smallest ways in which the natural world encroaches on the human one: “…the moonlight / barely reaching through the windows to / the circles widening in the water from the / dropped stone at the center of our minds.” These final lines establish “Lake Box” as not only a love poem, but also a Transcendentalist one with a message about how each and every human action somehow interconnects with a progression in the natural world.
The collection’s final poem “Call” beautifully testifies to another form of desire—the desire to survive. Once more, the speaker’s usage of the second-person pronoun “you” lures readers directly into the poem. About the “you,” the speaker observes that “—some kind / of happiness—” lies “dormant.” Images of “dim-lit highways” and “the blur of headlights” create a sense of being lost and confused. The confusion and impending disaster, nonetheless, end quickly as the speaker asserts, “I’m speaking plainly now, because I don’t / want to invite confusion or to remain alone.” More so, the poem develops what some readers can interpret as a call for humanity to be more empathetic:
…in this bright field. Step away from the edge and turn toward me. I see you. I know that ache in your chest means that you want to live
The phrase “I see you” anchors and centers the final stanza, reminding readers that, sometimes, a person’s greatest desire is to be seen by others.
In Desire Museum, Danielle Cadena Deulen admirably establishes a high standard for poetry that blends the erotic with the psychological while addressing important issues like climate change and celebrating Sapphic love and romance. The thematic and conceptual incorporation of nature as a means of processing human emotions echoes other deeply intimate collections such as Alison Prine’s Loss and Its Antonym. These passionate, enticing poems are emotionally gripping and provocative, and Deulen’s experimentation with form and line breaks push language and subject matter to their linguistic limits.
Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen can be purchased here:
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.
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