Pink Lady

Reviews / Votes

As Duhamel reflects on her transformed role-from child to caretaker to eulogizer-readers will appreciate how beautifully she relates the experience of love and loss. It's a memorable and affecting collection. * Publishers Weekly * Written on the cusp and through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poems speak to the inconsistent movement of grief and memory when compounded by the events of the wider world. * Booklist * Duhamel shows us her mom's humor and dignity and kindness, not just in her final days but throughout her life. Pink Lady is a loving tribute from a daughter to her mother as well as the recording of a grim universal crisis we all eventually face. * North of Oxford * Denise Duhamel is a bona fide queen of her craft. * Miami Chronicles * These poems are bittersweet gifts that endure, beautifully memorialized by a daughter to the woman who made her. * Bust Magazine * Only Denise Duhamel could have written these poems. Pink Lady takes a common but often overlooked subject-the decline of an elderly parent-and finds in it all the meat of the human heart. Duhamel shares not just the painful moments but the intimate, the illuminating, and the joyful. And all along we have the humor of the speaker and her resilient mother who complains of the 'wackadoodle' in the White House and the COVID-induced absurdity that forces her nurses to suit up like astronauts. Forget Gideon's Bible; it's Pink Lady that should be in every hospital nightstand. -- Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs These clear-eyed poems gracefully bear witness to the end of a beloved parent's life: the indignities, role reversals, and moments of panic and tenderness. The whole crazy matrix of pain and unanticipated consolation is revealed with equanimity and deep emotional intelligence. The COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 US presidential election provide a backdrop and a sense of the political freefall, turmoil, and fear that dominated public life back then. Did I weep while reading this humane, bright-spirited, heart-rending memoir-in-poems? Yes! -- Amy Gerstler, author of Scattered at Sea In Pink Lady, a memoir in poems, Duhamel allows us to walk with her as she witnesses the steady decline of her mother's physical and cognitive abilities. When my own mother began this phase, I became wedged between crushing sadness and trying not to think about it, but of course, I was consumed by it. Duhamel composes a riveting portrait of her mother at life's close-and her mother becomes many mothers, perhaps all our aging mothers. At the same time, we recognize the speaker as someone whose efforts to cope might mirror our own in a similar situation. Poetry shouldhelp us bear what we cannot bear. With piercing empathy and surprising grace, these poems do that. -- -Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems