Bookshelf

| browse books |
books
 

| book details |

Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems

By (author) Brenda Shaughnessy

| on special |

normal price: R 487.95

Price: R 438.95


| book description |

Spanning twenty years and five collections, Brenda Shaughnessy’s Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems introduces new readers to one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. Since debuting with the sexy swagger of 1999’s Interior with Sudden Joy, Shaughnessy has honed a poetic voice rich with contradictions: her poems are simultaneously tricky and blindingly honest, sensual and grief-stricken, coy and utterly self-possessed. She is a moralist with a profound sense of play, taking the patriarchy and the malevolent powers-that-be to task, as in her seminal poem ‘I’m Over the Moon’: ‘I don't like what the moon is supposed to do./ Confuse me, ovulate me,// spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient / date-rape drug. So I'll howl at you, moon,// I'm angry. I'll take back the night.’ Shaughnessy is omnivorous and fearless, even as she stares down her terrors, whether the blaze, fizzle, or explosion of wild love between women, or the unquenchable pain of a son’s birth injury. She celebrates, too, revelling in the pleasures and powers of the body and the transcendence of art. Her poems dance wildly to the sizzling music of the English language, awake to every syllable: ‘Artless// is my heart. A stranger/ berry there never was,/ tartless.// Gone sour in the sun,/ in the sunroom or moonroof,/ roofless.’ These poems are also, at times, laugh-out-loud funny – ‘like having a bad boyfriend in a good band’ – though there is always wisdom beyond the punchline. Beginning with the youthful love lyrics of Interior with Sudden Joy, and opening onto the wily reckonings of Human Dark with Sugar, the unsparingly fierce mother-love and parallel worlds of Our Andromeda, the reverb-soaked coming of age and coming to consciousness of So Much Synth, the dark sci-fi prophecy of The Octopus Museum, before new poems that pay homage to women artists and their pathbreaking art, Liquid Flesh collects an unprecedented body of work unlike anything else in contemporary poetry.

| product details |



Normally shipped | Usually dispatched in 3 to 6 weeks as supplier is out of stock
Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published date | 20 Oct 2022
Language |
Format | Paperback / softback
Pages | 240
Dimensions | 234 x 156 x 0mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 0g
ISBN | 978-1-7803-7629-5
Readership Age |
BISAC |


| other options |


| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

Exiles: Times book of the month 'Stanley Kubrick meets MR James'

Mason Coile
Paperback / softback
224 pages
was: R 520.95
now: R 468.95
Forthcoming

A terrifying locked-room mystery set in a remote outpost on Mars.

The Correspondent

Virginia Evans
Hardback
288 pages
was: R 552.95
now: R 497.95
Available from overseas. Usually dispatched in 14 days


Theory & Practice

Michelle de Kretser
Hardback
192 pages
was: R 415.95
now: R 373.95
Available from overseas. Dispatched in aprox 4-8 weeks as local supplier is out of stock


Broken Country: AMAZON'S BOOK OF THE YEAR - THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER

Clare Leslie Hall
Paperback / softback
320 pages
was: R 395.95
now: R 355.95
Usually dispatched in 6-12 days

An epic love story with the pulse of a thriller that asks: what would you risk for a second chance at first love?