Tag Danielle Cadena Deulen

community news & new Debate series poems

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

This week, I’d like to share some news from writers in my communities as well as a few opportunities in the world. Also this week: a new installment in my Debate series of erasures (for more info on the series, check out the original post). Enjoy!

Community News

First up, happy to share that poet and essayist Danielle Cadena Deulen’s third poetry collection, Desire Museum, was recently awarded a 2024 Lambda Literary Award! If you’re interested in hearing them read the final poem from Desire Museum, you can find it on YouTube HERE.

I reviewed Deulen’s second collection for The Volta Blog a ways back and also shared some of their work here on the Influence.

I’m also happy to share that poet and translator Dana Delibovi’s project, SWEET HUNTER: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila, A New Translation and Commentary is available for pre-order. The book is scheduled to be released on October 15, 2024—St. Teresa’s feast day from Monkfish Publishing. Learn more about the project on the book’s site.

I had the privilege of getting to spend time with the collection and wrote the following blurb:

If, as Joseph Brodsky once declared, the translator of poetry is a rival to the original poet, then Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila finds poet, critic, and translator Dana Delibovi answering the challenge with full commitment. The rivalry here, however, is not one of competing techniques. Rather, poem by poem, Delibovi renders Ávila’s vision with a clarity faithful to the original but which works in tones and nuances that speak to our contemporary moment. This tension across language and time presents parallel efforts and passions. Delibovi’s notes which accompany each poem add further depth and provide a running commentary where Delibovi’s own voice mixes with that of previous translators, ultimately creating a lively meditation filled with insightful details from Ávila’s life and practice. This layered approach is apt in engaging with the work of a mystic, work shaped by urgency and faith as much as craft. What Delibovi has gifted us is much more than a selection of poems: it’s a wholly distinct poetic journey.

—José Angel Araguz, author of Rotura and Ruin & Want

Lastly, I’m happy to announce a new book of poems, Matters for You Alone, by Leslie Williams recently published by Slant Books.

From the publisher: “Matters for You Alone is a spiritual exploration of friendship: its shapes and duties, stresses and blames—and its absolute necessity. The book takes its title from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s classic, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as it strives to interpret everyday encounters and events—the domestic, the mundane—in light of the eternal.”

Check out “Friend Shift” featured in the collection.

Finally, here are the latest additions in the Debate series (for more info on the series, check out the original post).

Debate Series: takes 3.1 & 3.2

  • An erasure poem that reads: we changed the border with border police now the border patrols me.
  • An erasure poem that reads: we border the border now the border ends in a president.

Abrazos,

= José =

* constellating with danielle cadena deulen

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

ouremotions_bThis week I’m sharing a poem from Danielle Cadena Deulen’s book Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us which I reviewed earlier this week.

In my review I focused on how the poems in the collection have a particular way of approaching the self as a moment of awareness and interpolation. This week’s poem, “Constellation,” does this work via the immediacy of a speaker engaged in an address of memory and revelation. By weaving the narrative of a specific memory with the narratives the speaker carries about their friend, the poem creates its own constellation of vivid recollection.

What holds these materials together is the box-like conceptual form, which begins with the first words of the poem: I close my eyes and it’s you with the boy. From the darkness behind the speaker’s eyes arises the memory of the friend with an immediacy and emotional charge that evokes the book’s title; the reader is “carried” into the memories of the speaker. Yet, with the poem’s final image, which compares the night sky to a box, we are once again in darkness, captivated by the voice of the friend, who gets in the last fateful word.

Constellation – Danielle Cadena Deulen

I close my eyes and it’s you with the boy
in the rain, zipping up his pants in the green,
hulking shrubs. You, marching out

like a one-girl parade, your face so white,
red-cheeked-cold and smiling like you do when
you’ve got away with something,

while I stand there as speechless as a crushed
bottle in the lot behind the 7-Eleven with
the other boy, wating for you to return

and not kissing him because I’ve never been
kissed by anyone but you and he’s not
prety. He’s smoked four Marlboros, shamed

them all beneath a rubber sole and picked at
the pimples on his chin, asking stupid
questions like So, do you like movies? And,

Do you think they’re doing it now? As if the
thought of you unbuttoning his dirty jeans and
kneeling down in the gravel at the roots

of the bush might inspire me to prostrate
myself before him, too. You’re fast.
You’re so fast that almost no one can see you,

that flash across your face when your boy
doesn’t stumble out declaring his love, when
we don’t applaud. No one but me can see

that you think he’s left you already–like your
father, your mother’s boyfriend, the last boy
you kissed and the boy before him. You’ll quit

school before you get through them all.
Sixteen and already a gallery of lovers: Boy
with Car, Boy with Tattoo, Boy with Crystal–later,

the boy who will leave money on your dresser
before he strides out your door, your face full
of sores, your teeth knocked out. He appears

behind you, encircles your waists, sucks on your
neck just to leave a mark. When we’re lying,
legs tangled together later than night,

I’ll touch the indefinite edges of his love-
bruise, a darkness surfacing from within your
pale skin. Of the boy, you’ll say, He says

he thinks I’m pretty, and the stars, far up
beyond a torn screen of clouds, They’re like
diamonds in a box that no one opens.

*

* insert crickets sound here *

Happy constellating!

José

*

P.S. Check out the giveaway below!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Everything We Think We Hear by Jose Angel Araguz

Everything We Think We Hear

by Jose Angel Araguz

Giveaway ends December 04, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

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