Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy Poems

What began as wildfire ends up
on a candle wick. In reverse,
it is contained,
...

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.
...

Brenda Shaughnessy Biography

Brenda Shaughnessy (born in Okinawa, 1970) is an American poet. She grew up in Southern California. She received her BA in literature and women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and MFA at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, BOMB, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) is her most recent book of poetry and was selected as a Library Journal "Book of the Year" and as one of the "100 Best Books of 2013" by the New York Times as well as being shortlisted for both the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the poetry editor-at-large at Tin House magazine, and is Assistant Professor of English and MFA Program at Rutgers–Newark. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, poet Craig Morgan Teicher, and their son and daughter. She currently teaches at New York University among others.)

The Best Poem Of Brenda Shaughnessy

Big Game

—after Richard Brautigan's "A Candlelion Poem"

What began as wildfire ends up
on a candle wick. In reverse,
it is contained,

a lion head in a hunter's den.
Big Game.

Bigger than one I played
with matches and twigs and glass
in the shade.

When I was young, there was no sun
and I was afraid.

Now, in grownhood, I call the ghost
to my fragile table, my fleshy supper,
my tiny flame.

Not just any old, but THE ghost,
the last one I will be,

the future me,
finally the sharpest knife
in the drawer.

The pride is proud.
The crowd is loud, like garbage dumping

or how a brown bag ripping
sounds like a shout
that tells the town the house

is burning down.
Drowns out some small folded breath

of otherlife: O that of a lioness licking her cubs to sleep in a dream of
savage gold.

O that roaring, not yet and yet
and not yet dead.

So many fires start in my head.

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