Interior with Sudden Joy (Paperback)

A first book of poems that drew comparisons to Blake, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, this savvy, musical volume is lovesick over rhetoric, buzzed on wordplay, linguistically tragicomic, and extravagantly sincere. Shaughnessy's postmodern love poems come from the heart, "this strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt." (As she notes elsewhere: "What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.") One of the more remarkable debuts to grace American verse in recent memory, Interior with Suddden Joy will reward, charm, and intoxicate all students of poetry.