Spider Woman Wields an Uzi? Give Us a Break, Duhamel!

Every birdhouse requires a craftsman, and I've found the perfect carpenter in Denise Duhamel, who shamelessly hurls her woodwork about and doesn't bother to brush off the sawdust. Her 2005 release Two and Two epitomizes pop poetry, dropping hefty cultural bombs and Hollywood wit into the hands of dilettantes eager to feel "in" on the joke. And joke she does, relentlessly. Like the pairs of jackasses and geese on the book's cover, her poems bray and squawk with twisted whimsy. At times (once), she pulls this off without seeming too grating, like in "The Accident":

He used to sing to us, Down
In the bottom of an itty-bitty pool...Now he can't fall
Asleep without falling, down
in the bottom of his own big pool of blood...
My father steps up the hill
To fetch another pail of blood

She does, of course, know how to play with language, but squanders her gift by turning the game into juvenile gibberish and pulp poetic puns:

Our Americano was an example to
yackety -yak yes-men everywhere. He inspired a
zillion Zen hipsters, zoot-suiters, and zazoos with his zing, zazzle, and zowie.

Duhamel draws from memes and common ground to make us all grin and laugh, and to be honest it is hard to resist. But it's like she's screaming for attention and recognition, hoping to strike the fool's fancy with pop references and radical form, as in "Pituitary Theft," a short script acted out between a bad guy and an uzi-wielding Spider Woman. Or how about a "poem" comprised entirely of warning labels from familiar household products? Sure, they're comical. They may even be clever, but they are much too comfortable for someone who knows the potential of language and poetry to move, transform and bewilder.