Two And Two: (Pitt Poetry Series)

Denise Duhamel's much anticipated new collection begins with a revisionist tale--Noah is married to Joan of Arc--in a poem about America's often flawed sense of history. Throughout Two and Two, doubles abound: Noah's animals; Duhamel's parents as Jack and Jill in a near-fatal accident; an incestuous double sestina; a male/female pantoum; a dream and its interpretation; and translations of advertisements from English to Spanish. In two M\u00f6bius strip poems (shaped like the Twin Towers), Duhamel invites her readers to get out their scissors and tape and transform her poems into 3-D objects. At the book's center is \u0022Love Which Took Its Symmetry for Granted,\u0022 a gathering of journal entries, personal e-mails, and news reports into a collage of witness about September 11. A section of \u0022Mille et un sentiments,\u0022 modeled on the lists of Herv\u00e9 Le Tellier, Georges Perec, and George Brainard, breaks down emotions to their most basic levels, their 1,001 tiny recognitions. The book ends with \u0022Carb\u00f3 Frescos,\u0022 written in the form of an art guidebook from the 24th century. Innovative and unpretentious, Duhamel uses twice the language usually available for poetry. She culls from the literary and nonliterary, from the Bible and product warning labels, from Woody Allen films and Hong Kong action movies--to say difficult things with astonishing accuracy. Two and Two is second to none.

About the Author :
Denise Duhamelis a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Her previous books include Second Story, Scald, Blowout, Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems.She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Review :
Here comes the high spirits, good nature, smartass seduction, brassy intelligence, form-bending generosity, and large-hearted liberal brio of Denise Duhamel's new poems. It's all here . . . an ABC of jivespeak, a baaad translated Hong Kong action flick starring Spider Woman and her gynecologist, a multilayered heart-rending tour through the psychic landscape of 9-11, poems as Mobius strips. . . and it will make you smile too. 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.