Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems

by Brenda Shaughnessy

The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

"The next illogical step
in love poetry
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world
always do sound like diseases.
It is because they are engorged.
G., I am a fool.
What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.
Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened.
Caresses."
--from "Dear Gonglya,"

At once hyper-contemporary and archaic, erotic, indecorous, and extravagant like nobody else, Brenda Shaughnessy seeks outrageous avenues of access to the heart, "This strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt."

Genres: Poetry, Womens, LGBT

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University.

She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

About her work, the poet Richard Howard writes: "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."

Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't believe you've come back,
like the train I missed so badly, barely,
which stopped & returned for me. It scared me,
humming backwards along the track.

I rise to make a supper succulent
for the cut of your mouth, your bite of wine
so sharp, you remember you were mine.
You may resist, you will relent.

At home in fire, desire is bread
whose flour, water, salt and yeast,
not yet confused, are still, at least,
in the soil, the sea, the mine, the dead.

I have all I longed for, you
in pleasure. You missed me, your body swelling.
Once more, you lie with me, smelling
of almonds, as the poisoned do.

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

I really felt a lot of the word choices and imagery in these poems were really overblown and melodramatic. It became a bit exhausting to read them all, with lines such as

I will kill you with the blistering foods of a Crimean war,
sluiced with a dura mater's soldier-ration of tiny
moistures, in this temple of my tryst with the daughter
of the red god's red dog...

I mean, don't get me wrong. I like poetry that uses large overblown imagery and big smart words. Lots of other modern poets use imagery from ancient myth in new and interesting ways. But here it smacks a little of "Hey! Look at all the big words I know! I'm really smart and I'm going to prove it in every single poem I write for this collection."

That said, this is Shaughnessy's first collection, and I have a feeling she's got a long career ahead of her. Things will get better, she'll thin it out a bit. Maybe.

[Craig Morgan Teicher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admitedly, I'm biased...

[Juliet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this collection.

It is so unique and quirky and dark and sordid and titillating...

It is meaty even, except the meat is cut into tainted cubes and exotically florid squiggles.

In a way, it reminded me of the music of Rasputina, a band I really like, but even better, because this is poetry.

I really must secure her newest collection, ASAP.

[Erikaaaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basically my favorite book of poems ever, I don't understand why I initially gave this four stars. After reading it millions of more times over the last couple of years: infinite stars, infinite!

[Rue Solomon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someday may your icy love know the affliction
of the abandoned, of the sexual underchild: cyclopia,
a fusing of the retinas, to see yourself as I see you.

[Leanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The precision of the vocabulary and sound play is astonishing. Truly a unique language she has invented--this medieval, ice-sharp, playful, erotic music. Some of her poems go too far into the sound-play for me to understand--they get too obscure for me. But overall, I really liked the originality, flair, subject matter, sounds--this is a take on sex from a voice that is like a Victorian sonnet crossed with some sort of dungeon liquor!

Favorite poems: "Dear Gonglya," "Rise," "Fortune," "Your One Good Dress," "Epithalament," "Thirteenth Summer," "Postfeminism," "You Love, You Wonder," "Voluptuary" (my absolute fave), "Panopticon, "Interior with Sudden Joy."

A favorite line (satisfies my eternal longing for the imagistic): "To bones, fat is only fog."

Other thoughts: awesome font! Wish I knew the kind. Also, I had first read the author's later book, "Human Dark with Sugar," and it was fun to see some precursors to that book in this one (namely, the occasional emergence of a clear and sassy voice, and the occasional humorously relayed and consise tidbit of a sad truth that is just a zinger).

[Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

s it is, she is sort of smooshy and they are all love poems and they try to be something in leather but really it's not that, it's sort of nothing they way the poems are and the way she was too young to have them in print when they were printed, so the book is ehh and ehh and oh well.

[Letitia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was gorgeous and witty and made me wish I were enrolled in a literature class so I could be coached through it. Poetry is not my primary genre, but I did thoroughly enjoy this and found Shaughnessy's depth of language invigorating.

[A L]

She was really young when she published this but it feels like it's from a modernist master; pretty out there.

[Leigh Martella · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection felt too lofty and hard to grasp. Most of the poems seemed deliberately dense, affected, and too academic.

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry was made for unusual and unforgettable rhythms like the ones Brenda Shaughnessy creates in this collection.

[Leah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why English lit majors hate reading by the time they get done with uni.

[Maddox · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just not for me

[Kristen Brida · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOW IS THIS HER FIRST BOOK????

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The language of this book is solid, the sort of words and syntax I appreciate having around in my head. But maybe I object to the melodrama of it all? It pulls linguistic and emotive tricks but I'm left mostly unimpressed, unsympathetic. It is an aggressive collection of poems, in a way, hard to puzzle, or to ignore.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more than I did; I wanted more from it, or maybe just less opacity. There are moments where the play of words, the rhythm of them, feels perfect, and there are images that coalesce, but much of this collection stayed vague, just out of reach. I loved “Transpassional,” though -- the whole last half of it, especially, is just about perfect, funny and plaintive and sweet.

[Cassie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not exactly sure how to rate this book because it has more quotes in my make-shift notebook than any other poetry book this year, but at the same time - I didn't love it. I think I recommend it, "I think I can, I think I can."

Here is my review: http://booksandbowelmovements.wordpre...

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

for me, the consistency of her tone and style ended up working against her, creating a uniformity that kinda precluded anything from sticking out or being memorable. she's very talented, no doubt. but her poems are very dense and often don't flow enough to make for an enjoyable read. felt a bit like work to make it through, though when I followed closely there was a decent payoff.

[june · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am more than blue / If you are the violent imprint. I am swollen, / vexed endlessly and only / finite against your bodies."

"Your ordinary sweet kinesis, peevish / in the crumble and whetstone of your body."

"Give me five years, lovers, I will give you the ancient torture / device constructed of kisses, ..."

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book called desire machine. As in the words of the sentences are turned on some metonymic or punning or definition axis so that they all are jump jumping off the page in a grand grotesque parade.

[Nickky Faustine de Guzman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is it just me or this book is hard to read, like a trying-hard-high-brow-poetry-collection? While I got the images and messages of some select poems, majority of them, however, were hard to grasp. I guess I'm just used to Lang Leav poetries that are so in your face.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the 'list' poem in here... I can't remember the title. My books are still in boxes. :)

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brenda's still a great poet, but unquestionably her second book (Human Dark With Sugar, which I read first) was way better.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sexy stuff.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shaughnessy is probably one of my favorite current (She was born in 1970!) poets. She's hip, ultra-sexual, and sharp. I only wish the book were longer.

[Kate]

"At home in desire, desire is bread
whose flour, water, salt, and yeast,
not yet confused, are still, at least,
in the soil, the sea, the mine, the dead."

(from "Rise")

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional~~

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still one of my favorite poetry collections, decades after reading it for the first time.

[S]

1970-

Very female