Our Andromeda
4/5
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About this ebook
"A heady, infectious celebration."The New Yorker
"Shaughnessy's voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy."Harvard Review
Brenda Shaughnessy's heartrending third collection explores dark subjectstrauma, childbirth, loss of faithand stark questions: What is the use of pain and grief? Is there another dimension in which our suffering might be transformed? Can we change ourselves? Yearning for new gods, new worlds, and new rules, she imagines a parallel existence in the galaxy of Andromeda.
From "Our Andromeda":
Cal, faster than the lightest light,
so much faster than love,
and our Andromeda, that dream,
I can feel it living in us like we
are its home. Like it remembers us
from its own childhood.
Oh, maybe, Cal, we are home,
if God will let us live here,
with Andromeda inside us,
doesn't it seem we belong?
Now and then, will you help me belong
here, in this place where you became
my child, and I your mother
out of some instant of mystery
of crash and matter . . .
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper's, The Nation, The Rumpus, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and daughter.
Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Okinawan-Irish American poet who grew up in Southern California. After graduating from University of California, Santa Cruz, she moved to New York City where she received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and published her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Her five full-length collections include The Octopus Museum (Knopf, 2019), a New York Times Notable Book, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin International Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her first UK publication, Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She lives with her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher, and their two children, in New Jersey.
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Reviews for Our Andromeda
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I don't read a lot of poetry, and not contemporary poetry at all. Perhaps I had my fill at workshops in my MFA program. I find so much of contemporary poetry to be just poems about how hard it is to make a poem. But these poems are About Things -- not just Abstract Things like "Love" or "Justice" or "Loss" (though they are about them too), but about Things That Happened. There is a SF-nal quality to them that I liked as well. Has happily put me on a poetry kick.
Book preview
Our Andromeda - Brenda Shaughnessy
1. LIQUID FLESH
Artless
is my heart. A stranger
berry there never was,
tartless.
Gone sour in the sun,
in the sunroom or moonroof,
roofless.
No poetry. Plain. No
fresh, special recipe
to bless.
All I’ve ever made
with these hands
and life, less
substance, more rind.
Mostly rim and trim,
meatless
but making much smoke
in the old smokehouse,
no less.
Fatted from the day,
overripe and even
toxic at eve. Nonetheless,
in the end, if you must
know, if I must bend,
waistless,
to that excruciation.
No marvel, no harvest
left me speechless,
yet I find myself
somehow with heart,
aloneless.
With heart,
fighting fire with fire,
flightless.
That loud hub of us,
meat stub of us, beating us
senseless.
Spectacular in its way,
its way of not seeing,
congealing dayless
but in everydayness.
In that hopeful haunting
(a lesser
way of saying
in darkness) there is
silencelessness
for the pressing question.
Heart, what art you?
War, star, part? Or less:
playing a part, staying apart
from the one who loves,
loveless.
Head Handed
Stop belonging to me so much, face-head.
Leave me to my child and my flowers.
I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that.
It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead
and no talent for creatures.
No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s.
Don’t you have a place to go, face-head?
Deep into the brick basement of another life?
To kill some time, I mean. That furnace
light could take a shine to you.
There are always places, none of them mine.
And always time—rainbow sugar show
of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky—
but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply.
Never,
however, acres of it. Violet beans
and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it.
All those prodigal particles,
flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment
of glitches. The chorus just more us.
But nowhere bare and slippery have I
got a prayer. If I had two hands
to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.
All Possible Pain
Feelings seem like made-up things,
though I know they’re not.
I don’t understand why they lead me
around, why I can’t explain to the cop
how the pot got in my car,
how my relationship
with god resembled that
of a prisoner and firing squad
and how I felt after I was shot.
Because then, the way I felt
was feelingless. I had no further
problems with authority.
I was free from the sharp
tongue of the boot of life,
from its scuffed leather toe.
My heart broken like a green bottle
in a parking lot. My life a parking lot,
ninety-eight degrees in the shade
but there is no shade,
never even a sliver.
What if all possible
pain was only the grief of truth?
The throb lingering
only in the exit wounds,
though the entries were the ones
that couldn’t close. As if either of those
was the most real of an assortment
of realities—existing, documented,
hanging like the sentenced
under one sky’s roof.
But my feelings, well,
they had no such proof.
Nemesis
The sun has its nemesis, evil twin star,
not its opposite but its spirit,
undead angel,
extra life. Another version.
The Andromeda Galaxy bears children
who become us, year after ancient,
ridiculous year. The children,
the alternatively filled selves unrecognizable
to our faeries, our animals and gods:
us utterly replaced.
The kids we were, rejected like organs
donated to the wrong body.
Why aren’t they dear to us?
Why is that child least loved
by its own grown self?
If you aren’t me then be banished from me,
weird orphan with limp and lisp.
Who, nameless brainsake, are you?
Not my substance or my shadow
but projectile vomit, a noxious gas.
Don’t be me, please don’t be me,
says the adult, looking back into wormhole
as if jumping into foxhole.
Not me, never again: that terrible child
with the insufferable littlesoul
and bad mom and sameself sister,
and balky, stalky brother
and monotone uncle and messed-with cousins,
and let’s not even talk about the father,
the fater, pater, hated, fattened, late, latter dad.
Perhaps the Andromedans are such early
versions of us we can’t hate yet, ghosts
or our pre-living selves, earliest babies.
Perhaps they’re only lifelike, like
a robot cook or a motion detector,
not like a dog we love and know,
or claim to know,
who nonetheless attacks grandma
somehow. We say