Description

Denise Duhamel

« Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner »

In In Which, Denise Duhamel travels “the road not taken,” as Frost put it. Or actually, she cruises up and down the many byways and highways and could-have-beens. In these poems of speculation and wonder, often she doesn’t become a poet at all. Instead she’s a stand-up comedian or a hairdresser or an urban planner or prisoner in a Handmaid’s Tale America. Sometimes she’s not here at all, having already drowned at six or drowned in alcohol as a young woman. The poems in In Which indulge fantasies both hilarious and terrifying. Duhamel takes on the question of identities and how, through myth-making and erasure, we forge a life.

Praise for In Which

Denise Duhamel is at the top of her game in In Which—the title paying homage to and parodying an 18th-century chapter-title conceit. In Which is a comically brutal book where Duhamel, employing a kind of amused outrage, deconstructs the grand narratives we stupidly accept and live by. No one and nothing escape her biting wit, not even herself, which makes this little book even more charming and authentic. For as we all know, every satirist is really an idealist who is chronically disappointed by the silliness of the human condition, but whose satire can only work if she has the courage to ridicule her own fears and desires. Duhamel succeeds in this difficult tap dance, creating an energy throughout the book that kept me constantly jotting down in the margins, “Whoof!” or “Wow!”
—Peter Johnson, author of Miracles & Mortifications

About the Author

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, she lives in Hollywood, Florida.

Details

Cover art by Michelle Weinberg
ISBN: 978-1-931307-59-8
Cover price: $9.00
Chapbook: 40 pages
Size: 6″ x 9″