The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020
coming March, 2025 for purchase!
Cover art: Kirsten Deirup, Best Wishes, 2023, oil on linen, 22 x 26 inches, 55.9 x 66 cm
Courtesy of the artist and HESSE FLATOW, New York.
Photo: Jenny Gorman.
About The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020
In The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020, Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade exchange verses in dialogue throughout a fraught year. The pandemic, the U.S. election, gun violence, and the loss of feminist icons Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Helen Reddy forefront a series of collaborations in which the two poets face isolation together. These couplets mirror their two voices, just as the recursions of this ancient poetic form mirror our recent, lonely, and global routine. The Latest is a project of resilience, writing through “the dark days” with humor and hope.
Praise for The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020
Who else but the rabid feminists Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade could reinvigorate the ghazal, giving it new blood, women’s blood: Who else would rhyme Dolly (Parton) with Dalai (Lama)? These wild collaborators, in the spirit of the fearless Maureen Seaton, have commandeered the form, shotgunning it with Super Soakers into 2020 with questions for Alex Trebek: Did you ever guess the U.S. was in jeopardy, Alex? Did you know Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Alex? Duhamel and Wade delight us with brilliant humor, always faithful to craft. Did Rumi ever imagine a future ghazal with Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke and Mae West colliding with Chekhov? Through lonely and desperate days, The Latest whips us awake with a much-needed reminder to guzzle, to drink it all down.
—Jan Beatty, Dragstripping, University of Pittsburgh Press
Photo credit: Michele Tancrell
DENISE DUHAMEL’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021), and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which was CAPRICE: Collaborations Collected, Uncollected, and New, Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
JULIE MARIE WADE is the author of many collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla as the winner of the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry and The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone as the winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach and is a professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
DENISE DUHAMEL & JULIE MARIE WADE have been writing together since 2014. Their co-authored poems and essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, The Biscayne Times, Cincinnati Review, The Common, Five Points, Fourth Genre, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Louisville Review, The Normal School, Painted Bride Quarterly, Passages North, The Pinch, South Dakota Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other literary journals and anthologies. In 2017, they received the Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner for their collaborative essay, “13 Superstitions,” and in 2019, their first collection of essays, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, was published by Noctuary Press.