Liquid Flesh

<p>Spanning twenty years and five collections Brenda Shaughnessy's <em>Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems</em> introduces new readers to one of America's most audacious and thrilling poets. Since debuting with the sexy swagger of 1999's <em>Interior with Sudden Joy</em> 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.'</p><p>Beginning with the youthful love lyrics of <em>Interior with Sudden Joy </em>and opening onto the wily reckonings of <em>Human Dark with Sugar</em> the unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of <em>Our Andromeda</em> the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to consciousness of <em>So Much Synth</em> the dark sci-fi prophecy of <em>The Octopus Museum</em> before new poems that pay homage to women artists and their pathbreaking art <em>Liquid Flesh</em> collects an unprecedented body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry.</p>