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Synopses & Reviews
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…
Review
"Shaughnessy's particular genius ... is utterly poetic, but essayistic in scope." Hilton Als, The New Yorker
Review
"Over the last two decades Shaughnessy has stripped herself down to a voice that can sing plainly about disappointment and love in hard circumstances and the lost art of the mix tape." The Paris Review
Review
"Shaughnessy finds ever new ways to rend the heart in this biting and poignant anthropological study of girlhood and adolescence." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
Over the last two decades Shaughnessy has stripped herself down to a voice that can sing plainly about disappointment and love in hard circumstances and the lost art of the mix tape.--The Paris Review
Shaughnessy finds ever new ways to rend the heart in this biting and poignant anthropological study of girlhood and adolescence.--Publishers Weekly
Subversions of idiom and clich punctuate Brenda 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 can humbly catch glimpses of our own.
From I Have A Time Machine:
But unfortunately it can only travel into the future
at a rate of one second per second,
which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant
committees and even to me.
But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next
moment and to the next . . .
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of three books of poetry, including Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon), which was one of New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2013. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.
Synopsis
Ecstatic and jarring, Shaughnessy stirs eroticism, conjures teenage suffering, and offers maternal totems in this musically astounding collection.
About the Author
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of three books of poetry, including Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon), which was one of New York Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2013." She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.