Interior with Sudden Joy : Poems

Rating:
Summary: Terminally adolescent....
Review: ....willfully recondite, not restructuring language as much as hawking a private lexicon of buzz words in free association to the admiration of the impressionable. Not for adults, but go for it, kiddies, you could do worse among the glitter hyped as verse.

Rating:
Summary: Yes and then again...
Review: I was wowed by the first Shaughnessy poems I read -- jazzy, surprising, sexy. But there's not a lot more in a whole book of Shaughnessy poems than there are in a few Shaughnessy poems. Still, she has the tools to expand her range, so this is definitely a poet to watch.

Rating:
Summary: taken not lost
Review: I went to a reading and heard brenda give voice to the words
that were splayed out on her pages. Her poems leave one with a feeling that she belongs to our world but floats above us in times of heart break, love found, eroticism. She has a keen sense of how to shape an emotion into a universal but foreign language. Words that describe what we feel, but also allow the reader to marvel at what she has rekindled. Many say she has lifted her style from others, I disagree. She is creating her own language and giving refound beauty to words of another time.

Rating:
Summary: fiercely unique writing
Review: It's just so cool! The wat Shaughnessy writes is just so exciting. I honestly can't tell whether in many places there's a vast interior she put inside the words, of which I can only get tantalising glimpses, or what. But it raises the question, generates the feeling. At least it's an aesthetic. How great for poetry that she writes this way.

Rating:
Summary: Gorgeousness abounds
Review: Shaughnessy borrows a lot from her mentor, Lucie Brock-Broido--she borrows the jazzy rhythms, the elliptical idiom, the dictionary trove--but brings to it a lascivious revelry all her own. These aren't merely poems about eroticism; reading these poems is an erotic act.

Rating:
Summary: Wacky and Gooey
Review: These poems are thick with gooey goodness and B.S. has a grand voice, but at times I felt I'd eaten too much candy (and I like candy!). There are beautiful moments here (and the cumulative effect of the poems is impressive), but individual poems feel forced, wacky, gimmicky. The playful qualities that endear us also make us long, at times, for a moment of purposeful clarity. All that said, this is a poet worth reading and this book is worth owning.

Rating:
Summary: staggeringly brilliant
Review: This is a formidable book. One of the greatest first books of poetry I've read. Her writing is avant-garde & linguistically exacting. She's smart.

Rating:
Summary: Nice One Here
Review: This is a truly thrilling debut! The writer's play with language one senses is not merely "play" but a deep interrogating into the uses and meanings and purposenesses of language. her struggles to make sense and meaning out of frangments and nonsense are thrilling and heartbreaking at once to watch. This is what Post-modern work can do. Or Post-Post-modern work. We are soon going to be refering to this poet as one of her generations, and one of the future's, most important.

Rating:
Summary: fancy-pants
Review: This work represents deep, textual layering that shouldn't intimidate with its elevated tone. Sentences are highly structured and extremely literate with references to women's rights struggles, soviet nationalism and yes, even good old-fashioned romance.
These poems don't require patience so much as deserve repeated visits. Like a fine cheddar, the work accrues in value as it ages. Simply devine.