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    Our Andromeda
    Our Andromeda
    Our Andromeda
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Our Andromeda

    By Brenda Shaughnessy

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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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781619320284
    Our Andromeda
    Author

    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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    • 4/5
      I 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

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