Interior with Sudden Joy by Brenda Shaughnessy

Interior with Sudden Joy by Brenda Shaughnessy

The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

"The next illogical step
in love poetry
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world
always do sound like diseases.
It is because they are engorged.
G., I am a fool.
What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.
Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened.
Caresses."
--from "Dear Gonglya,"

At once hyper-contemporary and archaic, erotic, indecorous, and extravagant like nobody else, Brenda Shaughnessy seeks outrageous avenues of access to the heart, "This strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt."

Brenda Shaughnessy is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-Newark University and Tin House Magazine's Poetry Editor at Large. Her poetry has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, and she is the author of Our Andromeda and Human Dark with Sugar.