Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University.
She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
About her work, the poet Richard Howard writes: "The resonance of Shaughnessy's poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain."
Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.
“If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us.”
“(from A Love Story, Eight Takes) 8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I've invented so much and prevented more. But I'd like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn't love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.”
“I'm Perfect at Feelings, so I have no problem telling you why you cried over the third lost metal or the mousetrap. I knew that orgasms weren't your fault and that feeling of keeping solid in yourself but wanting an ecstatic black hole was just bad beauty. Certain loves were perfect in the daytime and had every right to express carnally behind the copy machine and there are no hard feelings for the boozy sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain, whenever it felt right for you. And when the moment of soft levitation with erasing hands made you feel dirty, like the main person to think up love in the first place, I knew that. It's okay, you're an innocent with the brilliance of an animalstuffing yourself sick on a kill. Don't, don't feel like the runt alien on my ship: I get you. I know the dimensions of your wishing and losing and don't think you a glutton with petty beefs. But even I, who know your triggers, your emblematic sacs of sad fury, I understand why the farthest fat trees sliver down with your disappointment and why the big sense of the world, wrong before you, shrugs but somewhere grasps your spinning, stunning, alone. But you have me.”
“Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die. / It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.”