Tanya
Brenda Shaughnessy is one of America’s most audacious and thrilling poets. In Tanyashe weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss.
In this powerful gathering of poems about her own “influencers”—as well as poems on Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette—Shaughnessy dwells in memories of the women who set her on her artistic path. In the title poem, she explores the eternal quality of an intense touchstone relationship with Tanya, about whom she writes, “Everyone’s not you to me… Worth loving once, why not now?”
We all have our own Tanya, and in this book we meet friends, mentors, sisters, lovers, who inhabit a verse classroom where Shaughnessy’s passion for literature—forged in her own formative studies, as in the poem “Coursework”—is our teacher. In flowing stair-step tercets, Shaughnessy leads us down into her generative core, exposing moments of spiritual and intellectual awakening, her love of art and the written word, and her sense of the life force itself, which is ignited by the conversation—across time and space—with other women.
Tanya is her sixth collection, her first since Liquid Flesh: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), which introduced her work to readers in the UK.
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 six 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. Her sixth collection, Tanya, was published by Knopf in the US in 2023 and is due from Bloodaxe in April 2024. 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.
More books by author
