The winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, this is a beautiful and original work that appears to be, on first impression, a light-hearted and amusingly self-conscious account of daily life, but reminds us that our mundane lives are utterly strange and magical.

"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 subjects—trauma, childbirth, loss of faith—and 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.

Writing outside the boundaries of rhyme and stanza, a poet praised for her striking associations and surprising rhythms presents a collection of modern love poems steeped in both hope and fear

"Marvelously sustained and densely rhythmic, this tightly constructed whole is built of parts that, at each level, all the way down to the phrase, constitute poems in themselves. Baus manages to keep a cast of words in constant replay until many of them take on the presence of character, and some emerge as characters themselves­-Minus and Iris, for instance-­keeping the whole on the verge of a narrative project that remains always just barely out of reach, just barely in another world in which language and animal endlessly interleave. Baus has opened a new literary field: the linguistic bestiary, a new zoo where words pace like fauves behind ever-thinning bars." -Cole Swensen, contest judge and author of Greensward, Ours, and The Glass Age

An extension of and a departure from previous explorations of family and art, these poems delve boldly into tangled realities of fatherhood, marriage, and poetry. Dealing with the day-to-day of family life—including the alert anxiety and remarkable beauty of caring for a child with cerebral palsy—these personal narratives illuminate the relationship that exists between poetry and a life fiercely lived.

Winner of the 2013 Colorado Prize for Poetry, Intimacy is a series of experimental poems that play with, resist, and acknowledge complicity with received concepts of intimacy that circulate in this media-centric age. Undertaking an expansive understanding of the word “intimacy”, each poem contains a word or set of words that modifies the noun, uncovering the attending, associative and often contradictory obligations that arise in our relations with one another

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune). Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. Now, the 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, called “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” by the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.