Dear Denise Duhamel,

I first fell in love with your poetry after reading "Delta Flight 659," your poem to Sean Penn. I thought: Denise Duhamel is brilliant! Denise Duhamel is original! Denise Duhamel is my kind of poet! I thought: I didn't know that I could write to celebrities or about celebrities. -Sure, I had read "(Lana Turner has collapsed!)" by Frank O'Hara in college, and I had read George Bilgere reference Beyonce in the poem "Say My Name." But this—this was different. This was, to state it in colloquial terms: mind-blowing. It blew my mind because of the extent of its cleverness and its level of linguistic word play.

So, years later, I was looking for a book of poetry to read for pleasure as a new grad student in Florida and I saw your book Two and Two on the University of South Florida Library bookshelf and I picked it up. Back story: A week earlier, I had written a poem about not having money for food and about the things I had to do to survive. So of course to my surprise, when I opened your book to the poem "Egg Rolls" at the end of a long and grueling day, and there was a familiar momentum and sense of desperation as you wrote about being in grad school at Sarah Lawrence in New York and the things that you had to do (like work crazy jobs and not sleep much and ration your food and consider spending your bus fare on some delicious sustenance, etc.) that uncannily echoed my experiences, I thought: She knows! She gets it! -And there is nothing more comforting to someone who is sacrificing and struggling to make their so-called dreams come true (namely, becoming a publishing poet with their own collection of printed poems) than to see a poem like this in a collection like Two and Two. But, my love of your poetry moves beyond an intangible bond and eerie parallelism (although, I love that mystery of connection and chance that I find in poetry very often, like when I stumbled upon Franz Wright's "Our Conversation" -but that story is for another time and place). Yes, Denise—I must say, my love of you and your poetry goes deeper.

Two and Two is rich, and full of what you are thinking. The poems in Two and Two are conversational—it feels like you are talking directly to me (and in some cases you are—speaking to the reader directly: "If you, the reader, have any other keys to unlocking this dream, please send them , in / the form of a poem or prose poem, to the publisher of this volume." (And YES! to you writing your dreams and their interpretations—hell, YES!)

Two and Two is full of imagination that stems from statistics, and historical commentary with a twist of blurred timelines (i.e. "Noah and Joan"). You make your own rules, Denise! I love that. I love when you wrote about Joan of Arc being "good with swords / and, presumably, power tools."

Two and Two gets down to the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts, the ins and outs—like in "Egg Rolls" when you mention the dented cans you bought on clearance, working early mornings at a health club, and how you had to shower in the dark to not wake your roommate. I loved that you didn't use punctuation in that poem. I loved that you wrote in long blocks of continuous writing to emphasize the cycle—the desperation, the thick of things, like you don't have room to breathe as you are in it and doing it and living it. It is full of images and setting. It is oh-so-visceral.

I guess what I'm really trying to say, Denise, is that I love the possibility in your poems. I love what you do (all of it, every single thing that you do!) in your poetry. I love what you write and how you write it. I love your love of language. I love your stories and your metaphors and your pop-cultural wit. I love that you talked about and wrote to Woody Allen about your concerns, commenting on and questioning the scenarios involving him and the actresses in his movies. I love that you can write an entire poem with chronological alphabetical groups of slang words. I love that you can write a list poem using warning labels of any and all kinds to talk about how not to read the poem you had written. I love that you write about mysterious and taboo things like incest and sex and body image and _____________ (fill in the blank because it's all in there). I love that you are you! I love that your poems are about you and me and women and the media and anyone who uses words and lives in this pop cultural and literary world. I love the abundance. I love the obsession. I love that reading your poetry feels real and authentic and familiar. And I love that you seem unafraid to write about anything under the sun--under your sun, under my sun. I love that you are part memoir, part journal, part image master. I love that you are present in your poems vividly, vibrantly, and without shame. I love that you are biblical and base. And now, I've noticed that I have transitioned from talking about your poetry to talking about you and how you inhabit your poetry—but, Denise, that is what you do to me—you make me feel that you are inseparably connected to your work, and I feel that by reading your poetry I am reading you, which is what I want to do in poetry, and in my poetry. So, thank you, Denise! Thank you for writing some damn fine combinations of words on paper that make me excited to be a poet and a writer and that teach me that it is possible to be me (in so many ways) on paper, in and through my poetry. Thank you for being contemporary and confessional in the most freeing of ways.

Love always,

Sarah Duffy