Interior with Sudden Joyby Brenda Shaughnessy
 As it is, she is sort of smooshy and they are all love poems and they try to be something in leather but really it's not that, it's sort of eh they way the poems are and the way she was too young to have them in print when they were printed, so the book is ehh and ehh and oh well.
{Introduction for Poetry Center reading}
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 postfeminism involving shirey temples and Shirley Temple's pimp certainly testifies to this. She weaves, by way of exactitude and careful installation, the lightness of contemporary love motifs with psychoanalytical, baroque, and classical notions of pleasure. While the singular attention she pays to every word creates an admittedly glittering soundscape, 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.
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