Lovely Asunder

Danielle Cadena Deulen is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Utah. Her book of essays, The Riots, is the winner of the 2010 AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and is published by the University of Georgia Press.

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