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.

"Brenda Shaughnessy's poems bristle with imperatives: 'confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.' There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy's kidding. Or she is and she isn't. If you just want to boss people around, you're a control freak, but if you can joke about it, then your bossiness is leavened by a yeast that's all too infrequent in contemporary poetry, that of humor."--New York Times

"Sassy, tough-girl humor. . . . [Brenda] Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."--Harvard Review

"Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O'Hara."--Exquisite Corpse

In her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. "You're a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There's a hero."

Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance--anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin--then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. "I'll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me." In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet's ease in a variety of genres, from "Three Sorries" (in which the speaker concludes, "I'm not sorry. Not sorry at all"), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover's body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images --not the least of which is human dark with sugar.

Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Honored as a "New York Times Book Review" "100 Notable Books of 2013"

Honored by "Cosmopolitan" as the "one" poetry title on their list of "Best Books of the Year For Women, by Women"

"A heady, infectious celebration."--"The New Yorker"

"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."--"Harvard Review"

Brenda Shaughnessy's heartrending third collection explores dark subjects--trauma, childbirth, loss of faith--and stark questions: What is the use of pain and grief? Is there another dimension in which our suffering might be transformed? Can we change ourselves? Yearning for new gods, new worlds, and new rules, she imagines a parallel existence in the galaxy of Andromeda.

Rave reviews for "Our Andromeda"

"Love is the fierce engine of this beautiful and necessary book of poems. Love is the high stakes, the whip of its power and grief and possibility for repair. Brenda Shaughnessy has brought her full self to bear in "Our Andromeda, " and the result is a book that should be read now because it is a collection whose song will endure." --"The New York Times Book Review"

"It is a monumental work, and makes a hash of those tired superlatives that will no doubt crop up in subsequent reviews. But the truth is that I have no single opinion about this collection--how could I? The book is a series of narratives that resist interpretation but not feeling--except that I am certain it further establishes Shaughnessy's particular genius, which is utterly poetic, but essayistic in scope, encompassing ideas about astronomy, illness, bodies, the family, 'normalcy, ' home." --"The New Yorker"

"Another Brooklyn poet, Marianne Moore, defined poetry as 'imaginary gardens, with real toads in them.' In "Our Andromeda, " Shaughnessy has imagined a universe, and in it, real love moves, quick with life." --"Publishers Weekly, "starred review

"Brenda Shaughnessy...laments and sometimes makes narratives about the struggle to keep her small family together in the aftermath of a difficult birth. In the title poem, she posits a galaxy far, far away where familial love might overtake all woe and turmoil of the heart and body and mind. Once there, she says to her son, 'you'll have the babyhood you deserved.' She also delivers a number of lovely lyrics in a supple, plainly stated line; some merely expressive, some with a philosophically questioning air; on fate, dreams, the present time's long gaze back at the past -- you know, all the good things poets write about."-- Alan Cheuse, on NPR's list "5 Books of Poems to Get You Through the Summer"

"Brenda Shaughnessy's work is a good place to start for any passionate woman feeling daunted by poetry. This book explores love and motherhood and the turbulent terrain of grief."--"Cosmopolitan"

"Shaughnessy articulates, with force and clarity, the transformation that motherhood has required of her. Her poems are full of regret and ferocity."--"Boston Review"

"Brenda Shaughnessy explores the possibilities of a second chance in life and what could come of it. Enticing and thoughtful, "Our Andromeda" is a fine addition to contemporary poetry shelves." --"The Midwest Book Review""

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of "Human Dark with Sugar" (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and "Interior with Sudden Joy" (FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy's poems have appeared in "Best American Poetry, Harper's, The Nation, The Rumpus, The New Yorker, " and "The Paris Review." She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and daughter.

Winner of the 2019 GLCA New Writers Award An NPR Best Book of 2018 In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn—sometimes all at once.

This book is the first in English to consider women's movements and feminist discourses in twentieth-century Taiwan. Doris T. Chang examines the way in which Taiwanese women in the twentieth century selectively appropriated Western feminist theories to meet their needs in a modernizing Confucian culture. She illustrates the rise and fall of women's movements against the historical backdrop of the island's contested national identities, first vis-a-vis imperial Japan (1895-1945) and later with postwar China (1945-2000). In particular, during periods of soft authoritarianism in the Japanese colonial era and late twentieth century, autonomous women's movements emerged and operated within the political perimeters set by the authoritarian regimes. Women strove to replace the "Good Wife, Wise Mother" ideal with an individualist feminism that meshed social, political, and economic gender equity with the prevailing Confucian family ideology. However, during periods of hard authoritarianism from the 1930s to the 1960s, the autonomous movements collapsed. The particular brand of Taiwanese feminism developed from numerous outside influences, including interactions among an East Asian sociopolitical milieu, various strands of Western feminism, and Marxist-Leninist women's liberation programs in Soviet Russia. Chinese communism appears not to have played a significant role, due to the Chinese Nationalists' restriction of communication with the mainland during their rule on post-World War II Taiwan. Notably, this study compares the perspectives of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, whose husband led as the president of the Republic of China on Taiwan from 1949 to 1975, and Hsiu-lien Annette Lu, Taiwan's vice president from 2000 to 2008. Delving into period sources such as the highly influential feminist monthly magazine Awakening as well as interviews with feminist leaders, Chang provides a comprehensive historical and cross-cultural analysis of the struggle for gender equality in Taiwan.

A first book of poems that drew comparisons to Blake, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, this savvy, musical volume is lovesick over rhetoric, buzzed on wordplay, linguistically tragicomic, and extravagantly sincere. Shaughnessy's postmodern love poems come from the heart, "this strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt." (As she notes elsewhere: "What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.") One of the more remarkable debuts to grace American verse in recent memory, Interior with Suddden Joy will reward, charm, and intoxicate all students of poetry.