false <![CDATA[Human Dark with Sugar]]> 2246677 1 <p>"Sassy, tough-girl humor. . . . [Brenda] Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."-<i>Harvard Review</i></p><p>"Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O'Hara."-<i>Exquisite Corpse</i></p><p>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."</p><p>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, <i>Human Dark With Sugar</i> 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.</p><p><b>Brenda Shaughnessy</b> 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.</p> 2252550 1 4 2008 Human Dark with Sugar total:94|5:37|4:27|3:16|2:11|1:3| 94 366 181 28 4 3 false false Tue Jan 22 13:29:28 -0800 2008 Tue Jul 01 06:56:59 -0700 2008
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3 3/4 stars.

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I was a big fan of Brenda Shaughnessy's first collection ('Interior With Sudden Joy')and...more...]]> 5 1 false false Wed Apr 30 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 13 09:05:11 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 13 09:05:55 -0700 2008 more...]]> 2 1 true false Sat Nov 22 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Nov 22 08:31:01 -0800 2008 Sat Nov 22 08:43:42 -0800 2008 1 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Mar 20 05:54:26 -0700 2009 Fri Mar 20 06:01:18 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Nov 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 03 15:28:49 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 03 15:28:49 -0800 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Tue Sep 08 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 09 06:00:19 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 09 06:02:26 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Thu Feb 26 18:17:43 -0800 2009 Sun Mar 01 09:54:26 -0800 2009
Favorite lines:

It's like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.
Better off alone.

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...but wanting an ecstatic
black hole was just bad beauty.

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I make a haunted lake and rinse and rinse.
I take w...more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Feb 09 15:14:15 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 09 15:18:13 -0800 2009 4 0 false false Sat Nov 08 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Nov 24 10:46:26 -0800 2008 Mon Nov 24 11:53:25 -0800 2008 4 0 false false Sun May 10 19:08:21 -0700 2009 Sun May 24 16:41:33 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Sep 25 10:23:12 -0700 2008 Tue Nov 18 08:40:02 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Mon Jun 29 18:16:03 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 29 18:16:03 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Wed Mar 11 06:35:31 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 11 06:36:07 -0700 2009 2 0 false false Mon Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Dec 18 17:49:27 -0800 2008 Thu Jan 15 21:53:11 -0800 2009 4 0 false false Sat May 30 12:08:37 -0700 2009 Sat May 30 12:26:15 -0700 2009 GREAT BOOK]]> 5 0 false false Sat Mar 07 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 16 10:13:01 -0800 2009 Sat Mar 07 21:32:03 -0800 2009
These poems make me dizzy and rubber-kneed. They feel like a dare.

Sigh...]]> 4 0 false false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Aug 15 18:14:14 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 16 12:29:00 -0700 2008 more...]]> 1 0 false false Tue Aug 19 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jul 28 10:59:55 -0700 2008 Tue Aug 19 07:28:53 -0700 2008 *****
It didn't get much better for me. The voic...more...]]> 1 0 false false Thu Jun 26 08:49:00 -0700 2008 Thu Jun 26 08:53:49 -0700 2008 5 0 false false Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 13 19:41:00 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 13 20:03:56 -0700 2008 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=2246677