Scald

Duhamel's new collection is also a new departure for her. Funny and satiric, always with an edge of existential sorrow, in her several collections up to and including 'Ka-Ching!' (2009), she became raging and rueful in 'Blowout' (2013), which recorded the end of her marriage and the search for new relationships. Always thoughtful, no matter how antic the incidents she depicts in a poem, Duhamel turns philosophically inquisitive in 'Scald,' and she, once a prosy, projective-verse practitioner, adopts poetic forms to suit the nature of her questioning. 'Scald''s three sections are dedicated, respectively, to the twentieth-century radical feminists who most inspired Duhamel: philosopher of the body Shulamith Firestone, antipornography activist Andrea Dworkin, and verbally playful, antipatriarchal theologian Mary Daly. While never eulogizing them directly, Duhamel applies their central insights to her experiences as teacher, poet, and historically, politically, and socially conscious citizen. Those insights, especially that feminists must question not just Western culture and cultural organization per se but even 'the very organization / of nature,' and that such deep analysis may be too demanding, pervade 'Scald,' and their inescapability is emphasized by extensive use of the repetitive and circular verse forms of the pantoum and the villanelle as well as anaphora and extended alliteration in several prose poems. Her wit never fails her, but comedy is not an objective of these plainspoken, accessible poems of ideas.

So many times I wanted/ to be outrageously political/ but then lost my nerve," writes Duhamel (Blowout) in a book that at times toes the line of a feminist manifesto. She frequently employs the pantoum, and the form's pattern of repeating lines has an obsessive quality that makes it appropriate for mulling over grand concepts: evolution, reproduction, the safety of a body. But modern minutiae also permeate these poems: the word "amazon" brings the website to mind before any of its cognates, and an autocorrected email signature conjures an alternate life: "In my new identity, I'm ten years younger,/ a lot skinnier, but I haven't read much." The poem "Rated R" is divided into sections named for film ratings: for example, paying your mortgage is "Restricted for Adult Activity," the 2010 BP oil spill is "Restricted for Crude Situations," and a bankrupt Trump Tower is "Restricted for Suggestive Material." The book's three sections bear the names of radical feminists (Firestone, Dworkin, and Daly), and the questions Duhamel asks often have a second-wave bent: "Why would women/ want to shoot anybody else,/ as they are so often victims of violence/ themselves?" Duhamel's robust sense of humor and formal adventurousness make the text enjoyable even if some questions remain unanswerable.

. . . the poems in Scald, many of them pantoums and villanelles, seethe with the absurdity that so often characterizes the plight of women. . . . Scald is a terrific, humorous, thought-provoking collection. I can't imagine anybody not enjoying and being impressed by it.

What a great ride! What wonders! Humor, witchcraft, history, culture, the 'Denise' in every poem shining forth with that special Denise-ness! (You know what I mean.) The wild pantoums and villanelles: perfect vehicles for her subject. Which is WOMEN, which is POWERFUL WOMEN. I'm so grateful for Scald. I love that Denise Duhamel is in the world and that she has it by the tail.

As much a manifesto as it is a book of poems, Scald is Denise Duhamel's great feminist statement—by way of pantoums and villanelles, of course. But more than a feminist, I would say that Duhamel is a humanitarian. Her words dignify the disenfranchised. Glory to Denise Duhamel for her formal ingenuity and her gleeful political imagination.

Denise Duhamel's Scald deploys that casual-Friday Duhamel diction so effortlessly a reader might think heck, I could write like that, but then the dazzling leaps and forms begin -- "Snake Pantoum,""Conceptual Villanelle" -- and Duhamel's sentences don't even break a sweat, sailing on with her trademark mix of irony, grrrl power, and low-key technical virtuosity, like if Frank O'Hara, Carrie Brownstein, and Elizabeth Bishop had a baby.