Danielle Cadena Deulen, Matt Donovan & Lindsay Bernal

Reading & Book Signing

Divided into four sections and shaped by female-identified embodiment, Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Desire Museum touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. “At once dreamlike and insistently clear(Chelsea Rathburn),” 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.

Deulen’s previous collections include Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, winner of the Barrow Street Book Contest, and Lovely Asunder, recipient of 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. 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.

Matt Donovan has published three collections of poetry, most recently The Dug-Up Gun Museum, an exploration of America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, the poems interrogate our country’s history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons and how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized.

Lindsay Bernal’s What It Doesn’t Have to Do With explores through sculpture, painting, pornography, and performance art changing views on gender and sexuality. The collection’s elegiac meditations link the objectification of women in art and life to personal narratives of heartbreak, urban estrangement, and suicide. Haunted by the notions of femininity and domesticity, the protagonist struggles to define the self in shifting cultural landscapes. Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, and Morrissey coexist within the unruly, feminist imagination of these poems.