Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us
Barrow Street Press
Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize
Reviews
“Danielle Deulen borrows the title of Montaigne’s essay for her extraordinary poetry book Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us. Both philosophical and anecdotal, Deulen’s poems are slippery pronouncements of our ever-allusive present which is co-opted by nostalgia for our past “ancestor utterly naked, rock damp beneath her bare feet” and anxiety for our future in which we will find we “were not, after all, human.” Infused with psychology and cinema, Deulen’s work reads like “poetry vérité.” Fiercely intelligent and unpretentiously profound, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a thoroughly compelling book.”
—Denise Duhamel, Contest Judge
“The touchstones of Danielle Cadena Deulen’s superb new collection are nothing less than the great philosophers of the Western canon, ranging from the pre-Socratics to Hélène Cixous. Yet her pensées, troubled meditations and edgy but graceful lyrics are too searching and honest to look to these sources for consolation. Instead, these are poems which remind us of what William Matthews saw as one of the core functions of poetry—its recognition of “the need of experience to resist resolution into knowledge.” Deulen’s poems are as impassioned as they are intelligent, as elegant as they are unflinching. Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a book of sustained and haunting power.”
—David Wojahn
“The poems of Danielle Deulen’s Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us are as superbly ambitious as they are fiercely intimate – and those things require each other here. And so they are lyric in the rightest sense, shaped by an intuitive, associative logic – as in the title poem, where secrets of ancient mathematicians, mothers drinking gin from Solo cups, recollections of a coming-of-age friendship, and the knotweed and bronze hills of eastern Oregon all gather into a chorus about order and irrationality and hurt. Whether looking through Lacan at a child’s split reflection in a carousel mirror, or careening through a litany of daily human catastrophes we bring about because (perhaps a paradox of privilege) “we are bored,” these poems never just intellectually astound – they also burn.”
—Rebecca Lindenberg
Barrow Street Press
Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize
Reviews
“Danielle Deulen borrows the title of Montaigne’s essay for her extraordinary poetry book Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us. Both philosophical and anecdotal, Deulen’s poems are slippery pronouncements of our ever-allusive present which is co-opted by nostalgia for our past “ancestor utterly naked, rock damp beneath her bare feet” and anxiety for our future in which we will find we “were not, after all, human.” Infused with psychology and cinema, Deulen’s work reads like “poetry vérité.” Fiercely intelligent and unpretentiously profound, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a thoroughly compelling book.”
—Denise Duhamel, Contest Judge
“The touchstones of Danielle Cadena Deulen’s superb new collection are nothing less than the great philosophers of the Western canon, ranging from the pre-Socratics to Hélène Cixous. Yet her pensées, troubled meditations and edgy but graceful lyrics are too searching and honest to look to these sources for consolation. Instead, these are poems which remind us of what William Matthews saw as one of the core functions of poetry—its recognition of “the need of experience to resist resolution into knowledge.” Deulen’s poems are as impassioned as they are intelligent, as elegant as they are unflinching. Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is a book of sustained and haunting power.”
—David Wojahn
“The poems of Danielle Deulen’s Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us are as superbly ambitious as they are fiercely intimate – and those things require each other here. And so they are lyric in the rightest sense, shaped by an intuitive, associative logic – as in the title poem, where secrets of ancient mathematicians, mothers drinking gin from Solo cups, recollections of a coming-of-age friendship, and the knotweed and bronze hills of eastern Oregon all gather into a chorus about order and irrationality and hurt. Whether looking through Lacan at a child’s split reflection in a carousel mirror, or careening through a litany of daily human catastrophes we bring about because (perhaps a paradox of privilege) “we are bored,” these poems never just intellectually astound – they also burn.”
—Rebecca Lindenberg
American Libretto
Sow's Ear Poetry Review
Winner of the 2014 Sow's Ear Chapbook Contest
Description
American Libretto (2015) includes traditional lyric poems as well as lyric essays. These poems juxtapose stories of personal experience with philosophy, politics, and ancient knowledge, moving by associative leaps rather than carefully arranged logical arguments in a critique of contemporary America. The most prominent theme in the book is that of “awakening,” as the speakers of these poems always seem to be “waking to the light of our failures,” determined to see the world more clearly—to get the story right..
Sow's Ear Poetry Review
Winner of the 2014 Sow's Ear Chapbook Contest
Description
American Libretto (2015) includes traditional lyric poems as well as lyric essays. These poems juxtapose stories of personal experience with philosophy, politics, and ancient knowledge, moving by associative leaps rather than carefully arranged logical arguments in a critique of contemporary America. The most prominent theme in the book is that of “awakening,” as the speakers of these poems always seem to be “waking to the light of our failures,” determined to see the world more clearly—to get the story right..
The Riots
University of Georgia Press
Winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction
Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award
Reviews
"There are moments of transcendent prose in this manuscript that elevate it far beyond what we might expect of it at first blush. It manages to become more profound, and more beautiful, the more desperate and tragic its trajectory. Finally, it is a triumph of wisdom and great art."
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North
"There is general agreement that adverse childhood experiences leave permanent scars, but with a person as gifted as Danielle Cadena Deulen, the result is transformative for writer and reader alike...Deulen poignantly and poetically relates the effects such experiences had on her, her family, and those around her. It is a sad, but beautiful, and, ultimately uplifting compilation."
--ForeWord Reviews
"Fierce, tender, explosively honest, Danielle Cadena Deulen’s radiant debut sings like a prose poem and lingers like a fever dream. In the liminal world of The Riots, the face of a dead girl under the bridge worries a hole in your mind though you never see her, mercy shatters trust, and a boy’s stuttering confession of love exposes his sister’s crimes against him. Through the grace and devastation of shared memory, Deulen dares to know the dispossessed, to re-invent her father’s life and try to save him as a child. She remembers what cannot be, transfiguring herself through the passion of desire."
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of In This Light
"The Riots is rooted firmly in that world of hurt, mired in the struggle to understand and accept the past, and to do so—crucially—without being defeated by the onslaught of negative memory."
--Diagram
University of Georgia Press
Winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction
Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award
Reviews
"There are moments of transcendent prose in this manuscript that elevate it far beyond what we might expect of it at first blush. It manages to become more profound, and more beautiful, the more desperate and tragic its trajectory. Finally, it is a triumph of wisdom and great art."
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North
"There is general agreement that adverse childhood experiences leave permanent scars, but with a person as gifted as Danielle Cadena Deulen, the result is transformative for writer and reader alike...Deulen poignantly and poetically relates the effects such experiences had on her, her family, and those around her. It is a sad, but beautiful, and, ultimately uplifting compilation."
--ForeWord Reviews
"Fierce, tender, explosively honest, Danielle Cadena Deulen’s radiant debut sings like a prose poem and lingers like a fever dream. In the liminal world of The Riots, the face of a dead girl under the bridge worries a hole in your mind though you never see her, mercy shatters trust, and a boy’s stuttering confession of love exposes his sister’s crimes against him. Through the grace and devastation of shared memory, Deulen dares to know the dispossessed, to re-invent her father’s life and try to save him as a child. She remembers what cannot be, transfiguring herself through the passion of desire."
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of In This Light
"The Riots is rooted firmly in that world of hurt, mired in the struggle to understand and accept the past, and to do so—crucially—without being defeated by the onslaught of negative memory."
--Diagram
Lovely Asunder
University of Arkansas Press
Winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize
Winner of the Utah Book Award
Reviews
“Lovely Asunder brims with poems of intense lyric beauty, confronting the dark wealth of the human heart. ‘How do we know, without words / to say it, that you are the summation of a lifetime / of desire?’ Deulen asks in the poem ‘Interrogation’—we can begin to know by reading this book.”
—Dana Levin, author of Wedding Day and In the Surgical Theatre
“Lovely Asunder delves into the grave depths of desire. Bristling with passion, fierce in their self-scrutiny, these exquisite poems tightrope between the intimate and the metaphysical. At once lovely—beautiful, harmonious, inspiring—and asunder—broken, fragmented, distinct—the poems embody paradox with their elaborate and baroque music and their austere and harrowing vision. ‘Lord,’ a speaker asks in the poem ‘Hearth,’ ‘save me from the ordinary world.’ The poet saves us from the ordinary at every turn with her extraordinary juxtapositions, with her uncanny images, and with her breathtaking ability to see from original and oblique angles the world afresh in all its seductive strangeness.”
—Eric Pankey, author of The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems
“At one point in her riveting new collection Deulen promises to ‘go / further inland, like a lenient / hurricane.’ I’d say she’s more of a lyric hurricane; wreaking exquisite havoc on an imperfect world, she has the power to excavate the ‘sound / we are born hearing, and so don’t hear.’ Often, she faces pain head-on, like the songbird in these two of the book’s many memorable lines: ‘A goldfinch flies into briars, gets stuck / It quivers in there—little glint of light.”
—Jacqueline Osherow, author of The Hoopoe’s Crown
University of Arkansas Press
Winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize
Winner of the Utah Book Award
Reviews
“Lovely Asunder brims with poems of intense lyric beauty, confronting the dark wealth of the human heart. ‘How do we know, without words / to say it, that you are the summation of a lifetime / of desire?’ Deulen asks in the poem ‘Interrogation’—we can begin to know by reading this book.”
—Dana Levin, author of Wedding Day and In the Surgical Theatre
“Lovely Asunder delves into the grave depths of desire. Bristling with passion, fierce in their self-scrutiny, these exquisite poems tightrope between the intimate and the metaphysical. At once lovely—beautiful, harmonious, inspiring—and asunder—broken, fragmented, distinct—the poems embody paradox with their elaborate and baroque music and their austere and harrowing vision. ‘Lord,’ a speaker asks in the poem ‘Hearth,’ ‘save me from the ordinary world.’ The poet saves us from the ordinary at every turn with her extraordinary juxtapositions, with her uncanny images, and with her breathtaking ability to see from original and oblique angles the world afresh in all its seductive strangeness.”
—Eric Pankey, author of The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems
“At one point in her riveting new collection Deulen promises to ‘go / further inland, like a lenient / hurricane.’ I’d say she’s more of a lyric hurricane; wreaking exquisite havoc on an imperfect world, she has the power to excavate the ‘sound / we are born hearing, and so don’t hear.’ Often, she faces pain head-on, like the songbird in these two of the book’s many memorable lines: ‘A goldfinch flies into briars, gets stuck / It quivers in there—little glint of light.”
—Jacqueline Osherow, author of The Hoopoe’s Crown