Some art just makes you think instantly of the seven deadly sins. Not because they traffic in, say, lust, but because they arouse feelings in you with such painful precision that it seems some dark magic has occurred.
Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Lambda Literary Award-winning collection will make you ring with desire, seethe with anger, hunger for the next line. But fellow writers will feel one sin most of all: envy. How does she do it? How does she pack such a wide range of forms into the pages but maintain a constant, easy cohesion? Here’s an ekphrastic piece mulling over a Vermeer painting; here’s a stereoscopic poem that reads just as heartbreakingly in portrait or landscape. From prose poems to villanelles, Deulen breathes life into forms with care, experimenting broadly but always with purpose.
The collection’s name, Desire Museum, is simple but highly effective. It calls to mind the curation of emotion; the need to take stock of, and take control of, our personal histories. The pieces roam the spectrum of relationships—from a gaslighting boyfriend to motherhood—and sexuality, as Deulen explores what it means to be both the object of desire (“with thighs so taut men would bless me as I went”) and the one who lusts (for “the first girl to break your heart”). Such a range of intimate viewpoints and identities displays just how many forms yearning can take.
At times Deulen’s purpose is political, as with her most unforgettable piece, “The Uncertainty Principle.” By opening with a coolly academic definition of particle physics (“Only so much can be known about a part- / icle at any given moment”), she primes the reader for logic and clarity, only to explode that logic by the second stanza: “Only so much can be known about a part- / person at any given moment, a refugee / child led into a dim tunnel.”
Aping the bloodless language of science, she shows us the brutal reality of migrant children separated from their parents at the American border. Near the end of the poem, Deulen switches to Spanish, pulling us even closer towards the plight of children shorn of home and family:
Nuestros niños son tragados por la oscuridad.
They go into the mouths of wolves.
The musicality of the Spanish—which translates to “Our children are swallowed by darkness”—shifting back to simple Anglo-Saxon; it’s lines like these that you return to again and again, first as a reader, then as a writer. Not surprisingly, the poem won a Pushcart Prize in 2023.
Deulen roams her museum fearlessly, exploring tone as richly as form. The undercurrent of rage in “The Uncertainty Principle,” for example, soon gives way to wry humor in “A Series Person,” brimming with wordplay and wit. The poem may open with an exploration of depression, but the speaker quickly turns her head and, chuckling at the reader, whispers:
Now you’re worried
that I have kids. And you’re right
to be worried.
A lesser poet would have left the above as a single breathless line; she lets the last three words land, snowflake-soft, as their own little punchline.
What is the thread that runs through these pieces? Longing, sure, but of many kinds—to be with a lover, to be free; to run, to stay. If you want, you can read politics in the tea leaves of each poem, curated for the reader like a gallery.
More than once, we see how Deulen is writing to explore the roles that women play, long for, or are forced into. In “The Hunters,” the narrator and a friend take her husband’s truck “to bow-hunt elk in the cooling dusk.” They go on this pilgrimage not to kill, but to experience a sense of freedom. At one point, she writes, “I find myself raising an arrow toward nothing,” a striking image that mirrors an earlier poem where a friend’s ex-boyfriend fires his gun blindly into the street. There, the act reeked of machismo; in its echo, the arrow becomes a metaphor for longing—the hunter in search of a target to feel complete. The target turns out to be herself, searching for “the ghost of a past self who believed / she could go on that way, waning and wanting forever.”
Recurring images are a tool Deulen makes use of more than once—restless atoms, cloud forms, menacing dogs (I won’t name them all except to say: watch for fireflies to flare twice on the page). These echoes act less as motifs and more like treats, encouraging rereads to tether one poem to another. The ambiguity and strangeness of certain images—a woman leaning full tilt out of a moving car, a house with listing sawdust floors—grow richer the more you mull over them.
In life, there are museums, all too many, where you wander from room to room as if completing court-mandated homework, tilting your head at displays that do little to draw you in. No story is told; every work merely perches, airless and pallid. Deulen’s compact but moving collection is the opposite in every respect—a museum you’ll gladly return to, time and again. In the final poem, “Call,” Deulen whispers something to us: that desire, whatever its form, is most sweetly resonant when it is shared with another. “I don’t want,” she writes with moving simplicity, “to remain alone / in this bright field … I see you.”
The best poems create a sense of urgency, obeying Emily Dickinson’s famous mantra: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” The best poems are calls to action that make us want to write something, creating magic of our own. They inspire almost flirtatiously, seducing us with how effortless the author has made it all seem. If you are anything like this reader, you will turn the last page of this siren-call collection, feel something inside flicker like a firefly, and pick up a pen.
✶
Daniel Seifert’s writing is published or forthcoming in The New York Times, Consequence, The Sun, and the anthology Missed Connections: Microfiction From Asia. His work has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and longlisted for the Letter Review Prize. He lives in Singapore, and is working on a novel. Wish him luck on Twitter @DanSeifwrites.
✶
Whenever possible, we link book titles to Bookshop, an independent bookselling site. As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a small percentage from qualifying purchases.
Another Chicago Magazine 