Interior with Sudden Joy: Poems

The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

""The next illogical step "
"in love poetry"
"The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world"
"always do sound like diseases."
"It is because they are engorged. "
"G., I am a fool."
"What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us."
"Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened. "
"Caresses.""
--from "Dear Gonglya,"

At once hyper-contemporary and archaic, erotic, indecorous, and extravagant like nobody else, Brenda Shaughnessy seeks outrageous avenues of access to the heart, ""This strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt.""