Spanning twenty years and five collections, Brenda Shaughnessy's
Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems introduces new readers to
one of America's most audacious and thrilling poets. Since debuting
with the sexy swagger of 1999's Interior with Sudden Joy,
Shaughnessy has honed a poetic voice rich with contradictions: her
poems are simultaneously tricky and blindingly honest, sensual and
grief-stricken, coy and utterly self-possessed. She is a moralist
with a profound sense of play, taking the patriarchy and the
malevolent powers-that-be to task, as in her seminal poem 'I'm Over
the Moon': 'I don't like what the moon is supposed to do./ Confuse
me, ovulate me,// spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient /
date-rape drug. So I'll howl at you, moon,// I'm angry. I'll take
back the night.' Shaughnessy is omnivorous and fearless, even as
she stares down her terrors, whether the blaze, fizzle, or
explosion of wild love between women, or the unquenchable pain of a
son's birth injury. She celebrates, too, revelling in the pleasures
and powers of the body and the transcendence of art. Her poems
dance wildly to the sizzling music of the English language, awake
to every syllable: 'Artless// is my heart. A stranger/ berry there
never was,/ tartless.// Gone sour in the sun,/ in the sunroom or
moonroof,/ roofless.' These poems are also, at times,
laugh-out-loud funny - 'like having a bad boyfriend in a good band'
- though there is always wisdom beyond the punchline. Beginning
with the youthful love lyrics of Interior with Sudden Joy, and
opening onto the wily reckonings of Human Dark with Sugar, the
unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of Our
Andromeda, the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to
consciousness of So Much Synth, the dark sci-fi prophecy of The
Octopus Museum, before new poems that pay homage to women artists
and their pathbreaking art, Liquid Flesh collects an unprecedented
body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry.
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