Liquid Flesh
New & Selected Poems
Published on 20. October 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-1-78037-629-5 (ISBN)
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 *More details
Edition
International
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
412 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-629-5 (9781780376295)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
11/2022
Bloodaxe Books
€15.99
Available for download
Person
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 her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her five full-length collections include The 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.
Content
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 In?nite 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?
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 In?nite 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?