Interior with Sudden Joy

Rather than a "terminal adolescence", Shaugnessy presents us with a lexicon that is personal to the point of transcendence. She is both baroque and minimalist--at times ornate, at other times exacting to the point of abstraction. At times she creates a word to alter a familiar atmosphere, and at other times beckons the reader to rediscover words in their most precise and original definitions. Her poems are as deep and as deliberate as the great poets that have influenced her work--her plays on language and decisive structures are vessels for meaning that is not only totally expressed but entirely her own. It is both to her credit and our misfortune that she is the only female poet currently represented by FSG. As a student and an avid reader, to my mind she is one of the greatest American poets working today.

This is a formidable book. One of the greatest first books of poetry I've read. Her writing is avant-garde & linguistically exacting. She's smart.

I found this collection of poetry deliriously riveting. Shaughnessy's use and restructuring of language is highly refreshing, with imagery and wordings reminiscent of Ben Marcus, Tori Amos, C. D. Wright, and Neil Gaiman. I only wish this book wasn't so short! I am eager for more from this astonishing poet.

This is a slap-happy fever-dream of a book, whose reference points are as much Bosch & Lewis Carroll as Dorothea Tanning & Ashbery: astonishing & even grotesque in its continuous & consistent inventiveness. It's a pleasure to find, scattered through its carnival of ecstatic word-compounding & syntax-wrenching, the occasional gem of stand-up comic patter (as in "Panopticon"). There are brief flights of fancy that strike me as a bit too self-conscious, perhaps even precious. But what carnival would be complete without the sticky residue of cotton candy halfway up your sleeves? In a word: Fun.

Few poetic voices announce themselves as boldly and dramatically as Ms. Shaughnessy's does in this sensuous, spectacular, and savvy debut. Clearly aware of all the current poetic trends but slave to exactly none of them, Shaughnessy is idiosyncratic to the core. She braids sound, sense, and her own certain something into an oval rug and lounges on it splendidly. The delight she makes there is ours for the taking. Bawdy, penitent, beaten, triumphant. Hip, gorgeous. A rare bird of her own imagining, to read this book is to savor the rewards of the singular personality, as Shaughnessy's poetry is, as Hopkins said all poetry should be, "beautiful to the individuation."