Brenda Shaughnessy's first collection of poems,
Interior with Sudden Joy, was nominated
for several awards, and a finalist for the 2000 Lambda
Literary Award in Poetry.
FSG's press release called her "queer, cool, excited,
and pissed," and her version of post-feminism involving
Shirley Temples and Shirley Temple's pimp
certainly testifies to this.
But Shaughnessy's irreverence is only one
of her many constructions.
Interior with Sudden Joy weaves--
by way of exactitude and careful installation--
the lightness of contemporary love motifs
with psychoanalytical, baroque, and classical notions
of pleasure.
The singular attention paid to every word
creates a glittering soundscape, but something else
rises to the surface.
The boundedness of words themselves, what they reveal,
and what they repress.
Above all, Shaughnessy isolates those desires inside language.
How a word comes to, in the mouth and in the mind.
Ladies and gentlemen, Brenda Shaughnessy.
[APPLAUSE]