Brenda Shaughnessy is one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. Spanning twenty years and five collections, LIQUID FLESH: New & Selected Poems (2022) introduces readers outside the US to her work. 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.
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. 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. It was followed by her sixth collection, TANYA (2023), published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2024.
Neil Astley filmed Brenda Shaughnessy reading from her Bloodaxe titles in April 2024 during Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland. The poems she reads here from LIQUID FLESH are ‘Dancing in My Room Alone’, ‘Head Handed’, ‘Miracles’, ‘Big Game’, ‘Identity and Community’ and ‘Blueberries for Cal’. A separate video is available of her reading from TANYA in Galway ( • Brenda Shaughnessy : T... ).
4 окт 2024
