So Much Synth

"Over the last two decades Shaughnessy has stripped herself down to a voice that can sing plainly about disappointment and love in hard circumstances and the lost art of the mix tape."--The Paris Review

"Shaughnessy finds ever new ways to rend the heart in this biting and poignant anthropological study of girlhood and adolescence."--Publishers Weekly

Subversions of idiom and clich punctuate Brenda Shaughnessy's fourth collection as she approaches middle age and revisits the memories, romances, and music of adolescence. So Much Synth is a brave and ferocious collection composed of equal parts femininity, pain, pleasure, and synthesizer. While Shaughnessy tenderly winces at her youthful excesses, we can humbly catch glimpses of our own.

From "I Have A Time Machine":

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future

at a rate of one second per second,

which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant

committees and even to me.

But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next

moment and to the next . . .

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of three books of poetry, including Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon), which was one of New York Times Book Review's "100 Notable Books of 2013." She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.