In Which

In In Which, Denise Duhamel travels “the road not taken,” as Frost put it. Or actually, she cruises up and down the many byways and highways and could-have-beens. In these poems of speculation and wonder, often she doesn’t become a poet at all. Instead she’s a stand-up comedian or a hairdresser or an urban planner or prisoner in a Handmaid’s Tale America. Sometimes she’s not here at all, having already drowned at six or drowned in alcohol as a young woman. The poems in In Which indulge fantasies both hilarious and terrifying. Duhamel takes on the question of identities and how, through myth-making and erasure, we forge a life.