Pink Lady
Poems
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
When her mother agrees to enter a Rhode Island nursing home in December of 2019, Denise Duhamel promises she’ll visit at least once a month. By March of 2020, everyone is in lockdown. The elegies in Pink Lady explore the resiliency of her elderly mother and nurses on the frontline, as well as the personal and universally experienced anxieties faced during pandemic policies. With focus, obsession, and even humor, Duhamel chronicles the separation of a mother and daughter, documenting the power of imagination, the aging body, and the limits of caregiving.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her tender latest, Duhamel (Second Story) pays homage to her mother's career as a nurse as well as her death at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when she was living in a nursing home among patients and staff "dress like astronauts." These poems are bold, expansive, and prosaic; they do not shy away from the painful realities of end-of-life care, nor from the specific horrors of the early pandemic: "My mom has a bandage/ on her nose from where the ventilator cut her,/ and clear tubes of oxygen in her nostrils." Elsewhere, the reader learns, "She has been confined to her room for over a year." Though the collection dwells mostly in the isolated space of the nursing home, the outside world intrudes; Hurricane Elsa, Donald Trump, and the greater social ramifications of historic times haunt these poems, but the book's intimacy gives it a timelessness that transcends world-changing events. "My mother stopped wearing a bra in Mount St. Rita's Hospice," she writes. "I called her a hippie and put a flower in her hair." 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.
