Brenda Shaughnessy

Biography

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in southern California. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Rumpus. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and daughter.

Judges’ Citation

“Brenda Shaughnessy, in her third collection, continues to work the rich verbal surfaces and punning, allusive textures that marked her previous work, but her art has been transformed by a galvanizing sense of necessity into a more riveting, sometimes fiercely direct consideration of what it is to love a child, to care for one whose ability to care for himself is profoundly limited. What Wallace Stevens called ‘the pressure of reality’ has deepened and furthered the work of a poet whose early poems indeed might have come from the same well as Harmonium. Without losing her music, playfulness or sass, Shaughnessy has established herself as a poet of breathtaking emotional depth; to read such clear, affirming song made out of love, grief and danger is both devastating and uplifting at once.” – Mark Doty

Summary

Brenda Shaughnessy’s third collection, Our Andromeda, delves into the idea of parallel existence by imagining the galaxy of Andromeda as a utopian. At once humorous and heartbreaking, fanciful and filled with difficult realities, Shaughnessy takes on the vastness of the universe by turning inward, examining human vulnerabilities as they are manifested in the struggles surrounding motherhood, human frailty, and a divided self.

Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.

Brenda Shaughnessy reads Visitor