Pink Lady

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[ed] 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. (Jan.)