Desire Museum
Winner of the 2024 LAMBDA Literary Award for Outstanding Bisexual Poetry
Consumed with the accumulation of lost time and unfulfilled longing, Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen is an intricate exploration of things left unfinished or unsatisfied.
Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. These poems trace the pleasures and pitfalls of sex, the anxieties of motherhood, and the ramifications of interpersonal, sociopolitical, and environmental trauma in women’s lives. In these pages, Deulen holds up a candle to desire itself, questioning what it means to recognize and embrace one's desires, or what it might mean to let them go.
In conversation with Hopkins, Keats, Crane, and Lorca, Deulen seamlessly weaves memories into dreamscapes and blurs the human and natural worlds. With love, wonder, grief, and awe, Desire Museum shows us that to live alongside desire is to refuse to be contained: “I refuse meaning [ ] the first sunrise reiterates the last.”
Danielle Cadena Deulen is a writer, professor, and podcaster. Originally from the Northwest, she now lives in Atlanta where she teaches for the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University. Her previous collections include Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, winner of the Barrow Street Book Contest and Lovely Asunder, which won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir, The Riots, won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. She has been the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize XLVI, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Poets.org. She is the host of "Lit from the Basement,” a literary podcast and radio show.
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