Brenda Shaughnessy is een dichteres wiens werk de complexiteit van de menselijke ervaring onderzoekt met urgentie en elektrische intensiteit. Haar gedichten resoneren met een krachtige mix van humor en diepe kwetsbaarheid, vaak met thema's als identiteit, het lichaam en relaties. Shaughnessy schrijft met een unieke stem die zowel rauw als lyrisch is en lezers meeneemt in een boeiende verkenning van emoties en gedachten. Haar schrijven wordt geprezen om zijn onverschrokken eerlijkheid en zijn vermogen om zowel schoonheid als pijn te vinden in het alledaagse.
Brenda Shaughnessy is one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. In Tanya she weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss. Tanya is her sixth collection, her first since Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems.
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.
Now in paperback, this collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics. Informed as much by Brenda Shaughnessy's worst fears as a mother as they are by her superb craft as a poet, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.