Recently Released: Brenda Shaugnessy's Human Dark With Sugar! (best title ever)

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Product Description

“Sassy, tough-girl humor. . . . [Brenda] Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy.”—Harvard Review

“Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O’Hara.”—Exquisite Corpse

In her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. “You’re a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There’s a hero.”

Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance—anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin—then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. “I’ll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me.” In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet’s ease in a variety of genres, from “Three Sorries” (in which the speaker concludes, “I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all”), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover’s body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images —not the least of which is human dark with sugar.

Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.


About the Author
Brenda Shaughnessy's first book of poems, Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999) was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and elsewhere. She is poetry editor at Tin House magazine and lives in Brooklyn.

Buy here: http://www.amazon.com/Human-Dark-Sugar-Brenda-Shaughnessy/dp/1556592760