Spanning twenty years and five collections, Brenda Shaughnessy's Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems introduces new readers to one of America's most capacious 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.'
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.
By:
Brenda Shaughnessy
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: International
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781780376295
ISBN 10: 1780376294
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 11 April 2023
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
from INTERIOR WITH SUDDEN JOY (1999) 13 Still Life, with Gloxinia 14 Lure, Lapse 15 Jouissance 16 What’s Uncanny 17 Swell 18 Dear Gonglya, 19 Rise 20 Glossary 22 Your One Good Dress 23 Lacquer 24 Epithalament 25 Cinema Poisoning 26 Postfeminism 27 Project for a Fainting 28 You Love, You Wonder 29 Ever 30 Interior with Sudden Joy from HUMAN DARK WITH SUGAR (2008) 35 I’m Over the Moon 37 Why is the Color of Snow? 39 One Love Story, Eight Takes 43 I’m Perfect at Feelings 45 Drift 46 Me in Paradise 48 Embarrassment 52 A Poet’s Poem 53 First Date and Still Very Very Lonely 55 Dancing in my Room Alone 57 A Brown Age from OUR ANDROMEDA (2012) 61 Artless 63 Head Handed 64 Nemesis 68 The World’s Arm 70 Streetlamps 72 Liquid Flesh 77 Visitor 79 Karaoke Realness at the Love Hotel 81 Products of Perception 82 Miracles 83 Big Game 85 I Wish I Had More Sisters 87 Magi 89 At the Book Shrink 91 Headlong 92 The New People 94 Nachtraglichkeit 96 Our Andromeda from SO MUCH SYNTH (2016) 119 I Have a Time Machine 121 McQueen is Dead, Long Live McQueen 128 Artisanal 130 Wound 132 Dress Form 134 But I’m the Only One 137 A Mix Tape: ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ 141 A Mix Tape: The Hit Singularities 147 ‘Is There Something I Should Know?’ 173 Simone, Age 3, Late Summer 175 Never Ever from THE OCTOPUS MUSEUM (2019) 179 Identity and Community 180 No Traveler Returns 183 Gift Planet 185 There Was No Before (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles) 190 Bakamonotako 192 G-Bread 194 Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer 196 Thinking Lessons 197 Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence 199 Blueberries for Cal 200 Are Women People? 208 Our Zero Waiver 210 Our Family on the Run NEW POEMS 215 Moving Far Away 216 The Impossible Lesbian Love Object(s) 219 Tell Our Mothers We Tell Ourselves the Story We Believe Is Ours 226 Who Sings Whose Songs? 230 On ‘Loss of Feathers’ by Ursula von Rydingsvard 232 The Artist Jessica Rankin 235 The Poets Are Dying 236 What Have I Done?
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Okinawan-Irish American poet who grew up in Southern California. After graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz, she moved to New York City where she received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and published herfirst book, Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her five full-length collectionsincludeThe Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019), a New York Times Notable Book, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her first UK publication, Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems, is published by Bloodaxe in 2022. Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She lives with her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher, and their two children, in New Jersey.
Reviews for Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems
The resonance of Shaughnessy’s poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain. -- Richard Howard * Boston Review * Shaughnessy can write the kind of line that is confusing in its beauty, whose beauty exceeds its sense, [lines] that can be read and reread without exhausting their potential meaning. -- Elisa Gabbert * The New York Times Book Review, on The Octopus Room * 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 -- Victoria Redel * New York Times Book Review *
