Tanya, Brenda Shaughnessy
Tanya, Brenda Shaughnessy
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Tanya
Poems

Author: Brenda Shaughnessy

Narrator: Brenda Shaughnessy

Unabridged: 1 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/07/2023

Synopsis

The award-winning poet weaves a tapestry of literary heritage and intimate reflection as she pays tribute to women artists and mentors, and circles the ongoing mysteries of friendship, love, art, and loss.

In this powerful gathering of poems about her own "influencers," as well as poems on Dadaist artist Méret Oppenheim and the young choreographer Lauren Lovette, Brenda 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.

About The Author

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY is the Okinawan-Irish American author of five previous books of poetry, including The Octopus Museum and Our Andromeda. The recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark, Shaughnessy lives with her family in New Jersey.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Matthew

I absolutely adore Shaughnessy’s first collection of poetry. And ‘Tanya’ feels like a “grown up” version of that collection. A poem in here even looks back to the first collection like an older person reliving a memory while looking at a photo of the self in a history so long ago. How would we corre......more

Goodreads review by Amber

**I received an eARC on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review** **Some quotes may not match the final copy found in the published book** Brenda Shaughnessy is a new name to me, but I'm also painfully new to the poetry scene. I wasn't a fan of the beginning (it felt long and drawn-out), but the mo......more

Goodreads review by Andy

I like Shaughnessy's unusual syntax and rhetoric. Her poems are talky, and sometimes get more abstract than you'd expect for a poem. But they sound like someone tentatively exploring an idea, posing unconfident questions, reversing what she had just written, searching for a phrase to reach out to th......more

Quotes

“Juicy models of lyrical reasoning, [Shaughnessy’s poems] bring together wordplay and rhetoric . . . The poems have a fertile restlessness. They don’t settle into epiphanies but continue layering, swerving, branching, reconsidering . . . Her vibrant dives into the possibilities of [the self] invest it with multitudes . . . In the Shaughnessy multiverse, everything contains everything else, or has that capacity . . . Femaleness and iterations of feminism provide a framework for “Tanya.” The collection can be seen in part as a version of midlife stock-taking, via odes to women artists, mentors, lovers, frenemies and former selves . . . Shaughnessy [traces] her own derivation and education through myriad mothers, stretching definitions of “mother” to include frictions, crushes, heartbreaks and inspirations that became part of her DNA . . . Chief among the new book’s many subjects are love, absence and loss: how to live with or without them . . . [Shaughnessy] writes about love as being “timelessness itself”. This is a book in which the poet’s ability “to imagine and to wonder/fiercely” never flags.” —Amy Gerstler, New York Times

“A probing, richly rendered collection of poems . . . a reflection on women artists as friends, mentors, and influencers…Shaughnessy relentlessly sifts and shifts through our image making, seeking clarity while recognizing that life is ‘not a straight story or a jagged line.’ Meanwhile, she celebrates the eponymous Tanya, wanting to ‘repair the path between us.’ A remarkable book achieving all its ambitions.” —Library Journal (starred review)

"Shaughnessy’s poignant latest (after The Octopus Museum) honors the women artists who have inspired her own creative journey while delving deeply into memories of formative relationships . . . This generous and moving volume is a dazzling celebration of the mentors who spark creative life." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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