Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen’s artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender. In “Aperture,” she considers how she has contributed to her autistic brother’s isolation from family and from the world. “Theft” investigates her mother’s romantic stories about conquistadors in the context of the Mexican heritage of her biracial family. Throughout the collection Deulen experiments formally, alternating traditional narrative with “still life” essays and collages that characterize a particular time, place, and sensibility. Deulen is remarkable in her ability to present her own confusion and culpability, and she also writes with compassion for others, such as her own suicidal and unpredictable father or a boy in her class who sets the teacher’s hair on fire. In part because she herself so poorly fits the identities she might be assigned—white in appearance, she is in fact half Latina; raised in a poor neighborhood, she has acquired an education associated with the middle class—Deulen sees “otherness” as a useless category and the enemy of intimacy, which she embraces despite its risks. The Riots seeks to create what Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion,” and Deulen investigates her own act of creation even as she uses the craft of writing to put parentheses around the chaos of continuous living.
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.
Danielle Cadena Deulen's debut collection, Lovely Asunder, is filled with beautiful dangers. These poems, sharp and graceful, brutal and vulnerable, create from language a kind of chiaroscuro-both light and dark made more vivid by their juxtaposition. Throughout the collection, the poet appraises ancient myths through a feminine and feminist perspective, evincing the ways in which narratives transform personal experience and vice versa. The figure of the fruit, in all its implied and literal lushness, recurs like a chorus, and the speakers of these poems are haunted by the Fall-confined by the body, the mind, and the irrevocable past.
Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen’s artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender. In “Aperture,” she considers how she has contributed to her autistic brother’s isolation from family and from the world. “Theft” investigates her mother’s romantic stories about conquistadors in the context of the Mexican heritage of her biracial family. Throughout the collection Deulen experiments formally, alternating traditional narrative with “still life” essays and collages that characterize a particular time, place, and sensibility. Deulen is remarkable in her ability to present her own confusion and culpability, and she also writes with compassion for others, such as her own suicidal and unpredictable father or a boy in her class who sets the teacher’s hair on fire. In part because she herself so poorly fits the identities she might be assigned—white in appearance, she is in fact half Latina; raised in a poor neighborhood, she has acquired an education associated with the middle class—Deulen sees “otherness” as a useless category and the enemy of intimacy, which she embraces despite its risks. The Riots seeks to create what Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion,” and Deulen investigates her own act of creation even as she uses the craft of writing to put parentheses around the chaos of continuous living.
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