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Artistic Statement

1961 –

My body of work is very similar to my corporal body. I often employ traditional forms (Spanx/dieting) but just as often revert to a more copious mode (cake/lazy afternoons). In that I wear little makeup (sensitive skin/feminist stance) I use few purely poetic flourishes except for rhyme—both internal and end line (lipstick/nail polish) conceding to self-conscious artifice. Perhaps because I grew up Catholic, I am drawn to acrostics (crosses) and punitive syllable counting (the rosary). I am interested in bodies seen and not seen (bikinis, muumuus, the dead and not-yet-born), poems written and yet-to-be-written. Holy ghost poems that cannot be read but only felt.

Born in 1961, Denise Duhamel is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, including Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013).

About Denise Duhamel

Themes

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Beauty

About this Poem

“Every once in a while a person unfamiliar with contemporary literature asks me a question along the lines of, ‘What is your poetry like? What’s it about?’ Having recently fumbled through an answer yet once again, I jealously thought of the beauty of a painter’s ‘artist statement.’ That was the impetus for this poem.”
—Denise Duhamel

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Poem in Which My Mother Snapped

My sister and I played catch
with a warm tomato
from my uncle’s garden
even though my mother
kept warning us stop it.
We were in the kitchen,
my mother at the stove.
Grammy and the aunts
thought it was funny—

Denise Duhamel

2025

Florida Doll Sonnet

I love Fresh Market but always feel underdressed
squeezing overpriced limes. Louis Vuitton,
Gucci, Fiorucci, and all the ancient East Coast girls
with their scarecrow limbs and Joker grins.
Their silver fox husbands, rosy from tanning beds,
steady their ladies who shuffle along in Miu Miu’s
(not muumuus) and make me hide behind towers
of handmade soaps and white pistachios. Who
knew I’d still feel like the high school fat girl
some thirty-odd years later? My Birkenstocks
and my propensity for fig newtons? Still, whenever

Denise Duhamel

2015

Permanence

The barista at the coffee shop is covered in tattoos. She says there are only two ways they hold her back. 1. She can’t work at Starbucks. 2. She can’t wear a corsage, since she’d just be way too busy, and this makes me laugh. She says no to gifts from prom dates—the wrist corsage, the pinned corsage; no to bridal bouquets, the get-well-soon carnations. One day soon her mother will insist on sympathy wreaths around her coffin, which is closed, lest she be confused with the flowers.

Denise Duhamel

2013

Poems

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Artistic Statement

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