In Shaughnessy's visceral wonderland, obsession and poison go hand in hand, mirrors make people vanish, and nuns are definitely not safe in their alabaster chambers. She's ever intent on rescuing (or wresting) us from our easy beliefs. "The Question and Its Mark" is her stunning take on the myth of Leda and the Swan, its final couplet reading: "Leda possessed a pair of knees that also bent / in prayer. I ask of you only what she asked for there." Yes, this poet knows her tropes, and has a sure synesthetic touch. Her pairs of women are "hot with mixed / light drunk with insult," and her private language--in which words such as blue, strumpet, and silver reverberate--soon becomes a kind of lingua franca between her and the reader. In her debut, Shaughnessy's debt to the surrealists, particularly to Dorothea Tanning, is visible and audible on each page. She's also a distant and distancing poetic relative of Sylvia Plath, wielding a similar jaunty threat. "Epithalament," her twist of an epithalamium, invokes a woman lost--and begins: "Other weddings are so shrewd on the sofa, short / and baffled, basset-legged." What better combination could there be of tradition, the individual talent, and the razor-sharp imagination? --Kerry Fried

"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 has taught at several New York City colleges and is now on the faculty of the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton. She lives in Brooklyn.