by Brenda Shaughnessy
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Cate Peebles

Fast Into You

In the poem “Replaceable Until You’re Not,” Brenda Shaughnessy writes, “You are not broken. You break again / and again because // that’s what breaking means / To be whole…I am yours. I am still I.” Throughout Human Dark With Sugar, her long-anticipated second collection of poems, we meet with an assertive but vulnerable speaker. This is a book of many sections, subsections, titles and subtitles, all held in place by a spine and a name. To be human is to be a whole mess all bound by flesh and etcetera into a freakish, thinking, feeling thing — one that relentlessly, joyfully, picks itself apart. Shaughnessy draws attention to the contradiction of being made up of so many parts while appearing to be one single body. 

The book is divided into three sections: Anodyne, Ambrosia, and Astrolabe. And within these sections, the poems are further divided into parts—couplets, tercets, numerical sections, and named numerical sections. For example, “This Loved Body” is divided into 20 parts. But the writing in no way feels calculated or stilted by the breaks. The movement from part to part, poem to poem, is seamless. The poems explore these typographical divisions lyrically, with an intensely self-aware speaker; take these lines in “Why Is the Color of Snow?”:

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
to the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

…

What is constant is white…

Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self…                                   

 What is constant here is the insistence in the speaker’s voice. She consistently craves a closer look at the transient moment and the individual’s–her–passage through it. 

The joy in these poems is found in their humor, and there is humor everywhere. Shaughnessy is clever without being obnoxious about it and her wit keeps the poems moving. In “Breasted Landscape” she describes Autumn as “scrambled math and nipples.” And in an anti-ode to the moon called “I’m Over the Moon,” she writes, 

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone.

She doesn’t shy away from raunchy either, as in the next lines:

I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand…

I won’t give away any more, but it gets even dirtier. It’s this mix of humor and directness that keeps the writing from ever slipping into the ho-hum. Shaughnessy hits many notes, from angry to horny to wistful. Reading these poems you run an emotional gamut, but you do so with someone who doesn’t sink and drag. 

I’ve heard many of these poems read aloud on several occasions, and I have now read the book about three times, and I still find it moving, erotic and intellectually engaging. If you get a chance to hear Brenda Shaughnessy read, you should go. Of course, if you are unable, the book itself stands up to multiple reads and does not fall flat. It’s the kind of book you might want to read when you’re in a sulky mood, because you can identify with the longing and pain and then laugh at yourself and long some more. The sugar and the darkness are inseparable.

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