Written in narrow sections that blur the distinction between flash fiction and prose poetry, between memoir and meditation, Monograph veers from the elliptical to the explosive as it dissects the Gordian knot of a marriage's intellectual, sexual, and domestic lives. Invoking Raymond Chandler, Pythagoras, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf as presiding spirits, Simeon Berry curates the negative space of each wry tableau, destabilizing the high seriousness of every lyric aside and slipping quantum uncertainty into the stark lineaments of loss.

If I were Colen's agent, I'd pitch these poems to a movie producer as "David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein." Money for Sunsets, like Tender Buttons, is syntactically rich and varied, using fragments, repetition, and word associations.If I were Colen's agent, I might not mention her complicated and smartobservations on women, violence, and money - since I'm assuming that most movie producers are capitalists. In "Des Oeufs," Colen writes, "A naked woman as a motif is too easy." Too easy, indeed. Innovative and evocative, these poems have arrived at just the right cultural moment. And I, for one, am grateful they're here. - Denise Duhamel, Judge, 2009 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry

Poetry. "Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found that there should be some added..." wrote Cindy Meston, co-author of Why Humans Have Sex, in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (Volume 36, Number 4, August 2007). Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh have done just that in this delightful compendium that adds 237 more reasons. It's an exhaustive list, but it still doesn't exhaust all the possibilities. So be warned, you'll want to find some more.

Special issue featuring self-portraits in poems and art.

Guest edited by Denise Duhamel. Featuring poems by James Brock, Nick Carbo, Kelle Groom, Barbara Hamby, Michael Hettich, David Kirby, Campbell McGrath, Peter Meinke, Jesse Millner, Barbra Nightingale, Joseph Pacheco, Haya Pomrenze, Jay Snodgrass, Kristine Snodgrass, Emma Trelles. Cover art by Carol Todaro.

This is an exhilarating anthology remedying the clear lack of collaborative poetry collections. Collaborative poetry grew out of word games played by Surrealists in the 1920s and taken up later by Japan's Vou Club and then by Charles Henri Ford, who created the chainpoem, composed by poets who mailed their lines all over the world. After WWII, the Beats' collaborative experiments resulted in the famous "Pull My Daisy". The concept was embraced in the 1970s by feminist poets as a way to find a collective female voice. Yet, for all its rich history, virtually no collections of collaborative poetry exist. This exhilarating anthology remedies this stark omission. Featured are poems by as many as 18 people in a dizzying array of forms: villanelles to ghazals, sonnets to somonkas, pantoums to haiku, even quizzes, questionnaires and other nonliterary forms. Collaborators' notes accompany many of the poems, giving a fascinating glimpse into the creative process.

"Ka-Ching!" is a book of poems that explores America's obsession with money. It also includes a crown of sonnets about e-bay, sestinas on the subjects of Sean Penn and the main characters of fairytales, a pantoum that riffs on a childhood riddle, and a villanelle inspired by bathroom grafitti.

When her Florida apartment is damaged by the ferocity of Hurricane Irma, Duhamel turns to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem "Terza Irma." Throughout the book she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, hyperaware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. She writes odes to her favorite uncle - who was "green" before it was a hashtag - and Mother Nature via a retro margarine commercial. She writes letters to her failing memory as well as to America's amnesia. With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, she bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell.

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.

When her "smart" phone keeps asking her to autocorrect her name to Denise Richards, Denise Duhamel begins a journey that takes on celebrity, sex, reproduction, and religion with her characteristic wit and insight. The poems in Scald engage feminism in two ways—committing to and battling with—various principles and beliefs. Duhamel wrestles with foremothers and visionaries Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly as well as with pop culture figures such as Helen Reddy, Cyndi Lauper, and Bikini Kill. In dialogue with artists and writers such as Catherine Opie, Susan Faludi, and Eve Ensler, Duhamel tries to understand our cultural moment. While Duhamel's Scald can burn, she has more importantly taken on the role of the ancient Scandinavian "Skald," one who pays tribute to heroic deeds. In Duhamel's case, her heroes are also heroines.

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award.
In "Blowout, " Denise Duhamel asks the same question that Frankie Lyman & the Teenagers asked back in 1954--"Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" Duhamel's poems readily admit that she is a love-struck fool, but also embrace the "crazy wisdom" of the Fool of the Tarot deck and the fool as entertainer or jester. From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love through music, film, and history--Michelle and Barak Obama's inauguration and Cleopatra's ancient sex toy. Duhamel chronicles the perilous cruelties of love gone awry, but also reminds us of the compassion and transcendence in the aftermath. In "Having a Diet Coke with You," she asserts that "love poems are the most difficult poems to write / because each poem contains its opposite its loss / and that no matter how fierce the love of a couple / one of them will leave the other / if not through betrayal / then through death." Yet, in "Blowout, " Duhamel fiercely and foolishly embraces the poetry of love.

There's no predicting a Denise Duhamel poem, except that it might be about something you've never seen in a poem before: Mr. Donut, Rodney King, or nude beaches; Gertrude Stein, phone sex, or the Girl Scouts. Poems from The Woman with Two Vaginas, a book that was censored when it first appeared, are based on Inuit folklore. How the Sky Fell offers revisionist fairy tales, and the poems from Kinky are inspired by Barbie dolls. In her new work, Duhamel suffers postmodern angst when using the "therapeutic I." Denise Duhamel has startled readers of American poetry with work that pirouettes on a tightrope above the personal and the political, the spoken word and the page, the irreverent and the sacred. Queen for a Day showcases poems from her five previous collections, along with new work.