Two And Two

Electric, primary-colored, sizzling with speed and attitude, the poems in Two and Two confirm Denise Duhamel's reputation as a poet of high-octane high jinks, deep feelings, quicksilver shifts of tone and emotional register. Crackling with colloquial exactitude, her language is spry as a shot of Tabasco, brimming with knowledge and understanding that belie their own depths. . . . Nibble, sip at, swallow these poems: you'll feel more awake, more alive, closer to the world and to the words that give it back to us.

Denise Duhamel's wacky poems cavort, tumble, defy gravity, and most assumptions of the rational mind. But the real feat here is to be at once dazzling and somehow resolutely human— in the way the most fantastic, reeling dreams come to us in service of the heart's unedited, plain truth.

A poet of enormous vitality and energy. . . She deftly juggles [disparate] elements so they don't clash but confront each other, making new—and often hilarious—meanings.

People who never buy books of poetry will find a compelling reason to buy this one: at its center is a long poem constructed out of the e-mail detritus of 9/11, when citizens and survivors from all over the world poured their grief onto global listservs, as well as of news sound bites, bits of trauma-related classroom exercises, profiles of bin Laden and others, as well as elegies for the viction."

Duhamel's book feels at times like a collection of pieces that test the boundaries of what poetry can do. Her poems that take emotional risks to express the inexpressible are the most successful . . . Duhamel gathers her life's fragments against chaos. Beneath a surface of playfulness in these poems lurk both mourning and hope.

That rare book of poems—even rarer in this age of irony and emotional deferment-that moves effortlessly between unstilted candor and the verbal equivalent of slapstick humor.