Desire Museum
Danielle Cadena Deulen
BOA Editions, 2023, 104 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Desire Museum is a poetry collection navigating the thread of desire across time, relationships, and the female-embodied self. The collection explores and excavates the intricacies of friendship, lesbian love, relationships, and environmental and sociopolitical crises. The poems navigate selfish desire, unselfish desire, desire of the body, of love, of affection, of the world, and of justice, imbued at each angle with an unfinished or unsatisfied longing.

Beginning with symbolism that remains throughout the collection, Deulen paves way for desire as melancholy, as unfulfilled longing, discontent bleeding into regret for what once was and can no longer be. The early pages of the collection set the scene for the speaker’s transparency, often circling back, reasserting, or reassessing, “Searching / for the drawer, I mean the door, I mean my skin” (18) as in the poem “GASLIGHT.”

Deulen expresses desire infused with a lifetime of layers beneath it. The collection endures like a thread of life, of places, people, time, and spaces, mapped across the pages as a gallery of life and human existence alongside desire. In “SELF-DOUBT WITH A CRUCIFIX,” the speaker states, “she sits on her bed, necklace with a crucifix lying / between her breasts […] But I / still feel the slap of the first girl I kissed […]” (36).

Deulen exposes feelings of desire in the body related to regret in unfulfilled longing and hunger for a translation of desire. She yearns for meaning in mythology, and at times is direct with her longing – “either you didn’t love me or you didn’t love me enough” (18) in the poem “WHY I LEFT, WHY I RETURNED” and “you lean in closer for / a secret, but I scream it” (46) in “I CONSIDER YOU SILENCE.” Other times, the longing is elusive– “Only the wind / knows you. Knows you are in the middle / of waiting a long time for something, for someone / to return” (75). Ultimately, Deulen creates a space for the reader to be inspired by and understand their own desire through these texts.

Her most poignant poem is in the final section of the poetry collection, expressed in the long-form poem titled “MUSEUM.” Divided into six numbered sections, the piece reflects Deulen’s attempts to draft the piece dedicated to her friend, Erin James Staffel, who died of suicide. Direct with her language and transparent with her convoluted feelings, the speaker ruminates on memories of love and comfort, reckoning with grief in its layered complexities of sadness, anger, and desire. She follows this piece with a concluding poem, which reaches out to readers, reminding us, “I see you. Know that / echo in your chest means that you want to live” (96). She is reminding us of the spark of desire that lives within us all and keeps us alive.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She has recently completed her undergraduate study double majoring in English and History. Ruby is a lover, writer, artist, and poet, but mainly just a girl in the world.