Human Dark with Sugar

The poetry in this volume is tentative with sound, touching an association and then backing away. That does not mean it is not aware of sound; for example: consider the word "snownova," a kind of explosion by slow suffocation. One thing she does occasionally does stylistically is take a rhyme or a word, then slowly spin it round: end, mind, band, hard, understand. Stick, stuck, sticking. Fire, form, first, fraud, fair. Beauty, boozy, daisy.

The poems include themes of the body, food, sleep, and romantic completion. I find that I prefer the ones where she uses a more personal narrative touch and a more spare style; some of her extended analogies seem a little ungrounded to me. I prefer "You Too, Not Just Me" to "Replaceable Until You're show more Not." However, she has some lovely surprises in her phrasing. I also really liked her sequenced prose poem "This Loved Body," and many prose poems leave me cold, so this is saying something.

"The message is: /there is never enough/,

though we celebrate the hoax of boundlessness.
Celestial bodies, like our own, perish as if they'd scrimped

on light because they had to pay for it,
and no longer could. And froze like so many little match girls.

That's the brutal truth about the heavens."
--from "Spring in Space: A Lecture"

I think there is a great deal of passion in this book and I will be very interested to see what number three contains. Highly recommended, especially if you like Lisel Mueller, Adrienne Rich, and maybe E.E. Cummings. show less

Brenda Shaughnessy's collection is my first foray into her poetry. After reading primarily narrative poetry Shaughnessy's work came off as a bit too self-consciously academic but as I sat longer with the poems I appreciated her sense of intertextuality and playfulness with form and language. There's a lot of humor, depth, and care in this work and I'm sure it's one I will return to again soon.