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    So Much Synth
    So Much Synth
    So Much Synth
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    So Much Synth

    By Brenda Shaughnessy

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    "Shaughnessy's particular genius . . . is utterly poetic, but essayistic in scope."The New Yorker

    "Brenda Shaughnessy's work is a good place to start for any passionate woman feeling daunted by poetry." Cosmopolitan

    "Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."Harvard Review

    Subversions of idiom and cliché punctuate Shaughnessy's fourth collection as she approaches middle age and revisits the memories, romances, and music of adolescence. So Much Synth is a brave and ferocious collection composed of equal parts femininity, pain, pleasure, and synthesizer. While Shaughnessy tenderly winces at her youthful excesses, we humbly catch glimpses of our own.

    From "Never Ever":

    Late is a synonym for dead which is a euphemism
    for ever. Ever is a double-edged word,

    at once itself and its own opposite: always
    and always some other time.

    In the category of cleave, then. To cut and to cling to,
    somewhat mournfully

    Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of three books of poetry, including Human Dark with Sugar, winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times Book Review "100 Notable Books of 2013." She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateApr 11, 2016
    ISBN9781619321557
    So Much Synth
    Author

    Brenda Shaughnessy

    Brenda Shaughnessy is an Okinawan-Irish American poet who grew up in Southern California. After graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz, she moved to New York City where she received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and published her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her five full-length collections include The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019), a New York Times Notable Book, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her first UK publication, Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She lives with her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher, and their two children, in New Jersey.

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    • 4/5
      Poems that use a lot of assonance and quasi-repetition to make their aesthetic impact (e.g., “my well-filled, ill-hid diary” and “Who wears it and where?/I will, from the bed to the chair./Headrest, clotheshorse./Designer and model: mutally orbiting/the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral,/immortal.” The longest one, about being a half-Japanese, half-white girl going through puberty in the 80s—interspersed with Erasure lyrics, so I relate to a lot of it—doesn’t have many insights you wouldn’t get from the average feminist blog, but I enjoyed the other poems more. Shaughnessy’s narrator was more into Duran Duran than I was, which gives her a nice pun with “Le bon mot swallows the night.” The best line about female bodies, I thought, was “Isn’t blood a woman’s ink?”

    Book preview

    So Much Synth - Brenda Shaughnessy

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