Best American Poetry Blog

Ka-Ching! [by Emma Trelles]

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

from "Asphodel,That Greeny Flower," by William Carlos Williams

I can't imagine Williams could have forseen our current economic clime when he published this poem in the mid-fifties. He, along with everyone else, had their own concerns ("The bomb speaks." Enough said). 

Duhamel But this week I've been thinking about these lines while obsessively channel-flipping through the cable news networks. Each time I see a group of suits huddled behind a mic, telling me what I do and don't need, I think – these guys should pick up a book of poems. Specifically, these guys should read Denise Duhamel's crisp new collection, Ka-Ching!

I own all of Duhamel's books, and I've typically read them like I do a fine novella: from start to finish in one sitting. Her poems are hard to put down. I'm always wondering, "What's next? What now?"

I think it's because, like a skilled novelist, she's got a masterful sense of pace. Duhamel knows how to open in media res, with just the right portions of verve and speed, as she does with "play money," a sequence of ten prose poems she literally wrote on the back of the bills found in a board game ($100k through $1 million, to be exact). The suite reads as a memoir about growing up and family and the objects we value while we stumble through to adulthood: a set of custom pencils or chocolate coins wrapped in foil. When money is tight, or non-existent, the small stuff matters. 

There's wit and games here, but also more. Duhamel uses her bright mind to address painful subjects -the anxiety of unemployment, a parent's failing health, the specter of weapons and war. It's all flashing across our televisions and newspapers every day, yet somehow she manages to wrap these fears in a sprightly language that offers hope. I'm always ready for some of that.

Here's a poem from Ka-ching! 

Healing Pies
 
After my parents' accident, the pies kept coming: chicken pot pies (sized for one person), blueberry pies, ice cream pies, peach cobblers, lemon meringues, pecan pies, pies that were still warm in their tins, apple pies, another chicken pot pie (a big square one), pies with chocolate pudding inside, rhubarb pies, cherry pies, pies with crisscross slats of crust on top. Pies from the church, pies from my mother's quilting group, pies from the neighbors, pies from the aunts. Pies lined the kitchen counter, pies packed the freezer. Holy pies, pies with painkiller filling, herbal pies, prayer pies, pies that kept vigil, pies brimming with novenas, pies full of secrets that even doctors don't know, magic spell pies, smooth soothing pies overflowing with the music of rainforests, pies made from circles of light, pies with halos.