Full Description
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.
Contents
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?
