Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes

Dumesnil's precise observations, vivid images, deft humor, and brave willingness to invite in the whole of life, makes for a poetry that's rich and meaningful. This collection gives us the world with its beauty and love and the loss that always hovers close.

Dumesnil navigates the hallways of illness and childbirth with grit and grace. She offers us soaring birds, revolutions and plums. This is a book full of the love of women and sons, drag queens and last calls, and always the gospel of the body, and its constant prayer of falling.

What the poet knows is this: there are no lost causes. There is loss, of course, but to love enough to take up a cause is to keep faith. Dumesnil's collection is the good fight in miserable times; it is how we endure knowing that part of us always / stays back, while the rest marches on. This fabulous book is the part marching on.

And that's the core of these poems, really, the quotidian disasters-divorce, illness, common as mud-and yet the resilience, the impulse to regroup, move forward, persist, endure. What's so lovely about Dumesnil's poetry is not just the inventiveness with language, the vivid images, but a kind of 'attitude' that suffuses the work, partaking in a kind of wisdom, captured so concisely in her epigraph from Lao Tzu: 'Do you have the patience to wait till your mind settles and the water is clear?' Dumesnil is patient indeed and sees right to the bottom of the pond.