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REVIEW Danielle Cadena Deulen, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, Barrow Street Press, 2015 Reviewed by Alizabeth Worley |
Danielle Cadena Deulen's collection Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us is atmospheric and visceral. With repetition, meaning continually expands or changes; the images and thoughts she circles back to bear the weight of both silence and echo. The psychology of the collection wires up from the hot skin and muscle and blood to the vulnerable, blind spine to the hidden limbic center of the brain stem, a pulsing seed in the dark. Frequently the hyper-sensory state of trauma stalls the narrator in a kind of simultaneous fight-and-freeze, levied and pulled back and drawn out with meditations cool and clear like water or a mirror—such as in "To Philosophize is To Learn How to Die," in which she discusses Scheherazade, the virgin who told stories to evade execution by the King who had nightly taken a virgin girl to "bed and behead." The writer says,
The speaker and those she speaks for are continually, whether thrashing or sitting still, experiencing erosion by storm.
Or, if aftermath isn't the right word, the storm is nonetheless hidden, continually hiding its face under an optical illusion, as under the oppressive storm of capitalism and power. For instance, in "Subplot" she writes of discovering
The exhaustion of the private soul, the lover, stands sharp against the well-oiled machine gears of the capitalized, consumer-based society:
However, the collection does not sink into social, environmental, and political despair. Instead, it combats the numb by levying specific and personally implicated critiques of the politics in which leaders prioritize economy over the peace of nations and of the environment, such as of Cincinnati's Mayor John Cranley in "On the Uncertainty of Our Judgment." She personalizes the political—or rather, bares the personal that is constantly being clothed or camouflaged as political—as when she braids scenes and thoughts about her newborn son with the oil spill:
As the poem continues, the two strands become more intertwined until they are enmeshed, first in the free associations of the narrator thinking as the baby sleeps:
Through the poem, free association turns into parallel reflection:
In addition to political and social critique, Deulen counteracts despair in the forward movement of meditations, particularly through her lyric essays. Six of the poems in this collection are titled after the essays of Michel de Montaigne, calling on the prose, rumination, language, and concentration of the lyric essay, expounding and baring open some of the questions that haunt the poems throughout the collection. These lyric essays or prose poems hold philosophy up to the luminous naked bulb of the personal, realizing the theoretical. She packs in metaphysical and psychological strokes with each stage-direction and image. In "The Soul Discharges its Emotions Against False Objects," Deulen writes:
Finally, Deulen's collection is the hard-earned claim of resilience in trauma. In "The Needle, The Thread," she asks:
The presence of happiness, even under questioning, is all the more stark and luminous because it is so rare in this collection, but the collection itself also speaks to the remarkable whole-ness of the poet amid threats, injury, danger. The poem, the last in the collection, ends with an implicit nod toward beauty:
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