Our Andromeda Paperback – September 18, 2012

This book is phenomenal.

This is one of the most searingly honest books I've ever read. Shaughnessy delves into her pain, guilt, and anger after her first child is severely injured at birth. But the really amazing thing is that while she does not deny one iota of those emotions, she doesn't stay stuck in them. These poems, in turns furious and funny but always beautiful, express the other side of deeply felt pain and grief: the astounding breadth and depth of love.

Both raw and cooked--Shaughnessy works through very difficult emotional material with great honesty and art. Our Andromeda has all the rhetorical energy and verbal inventiveness of Interior With Sudden Joy and Human Dark With Sugar, and much of the cheekiness of those first two books, but this third collection is deeper and necessarily more mature. Poetry has been a powerful tool for this poet in exploring a wide range of experience.

Our Andromeda blew me away. While in conversation with the clear-eyed, steely brilliance of Sylvia Plath, it seems to go farther, often breaking with poetic conventions in working to do the impossible: find words and images to describe maternal grief. Shaughnessy creates an imaginative alternative world, Andromeda, where things could be different, then refuses to live there. These are brave, smart, startlingly intense poems that never stop trying to speak the unspeakable.

As a poet myself, I look at books with a different eye, almost like the third eye every mother must have.The poetess in this eloquent collection mesmerized me with her quirky-funny take on things. Like the firststanza of HEAD-HANDED:Stop belonging to me so much, face-head.Leave me to my child and my flowers.I can't run with you hanging onto me like that.It's like having ten dogs on a single lead.I wanna meet this writer, hang with her, feed off of her good poet thoughts.Pick this collection up. You won't be disappointed.Mary Kennedy Eastham, Author, The Shadow of A Dog I Can't Forgetand Squinting Over Water - Stories

I enjoyed this work of poetry immensely. There is a clever clarity the Shaughnessy has in the working of a poem on page. I highly recommend this work, including the title poem.

Fierce, heartbreaking, tender, musical, Our Andromeda is a triumph of love and imagination overcoming grief and fear. Inspired by the circumstance of her son who suffers brain injury at birth resulting in permanent disability, Brenda Shaughnessy works out in these poems her desire for an alternate world in which "there are no accidents" and it's possible to do things over. The poems oscillate between desire and acceptance, love and longing, fantasy and reality. It is a meditation on motherhood as well as self-discovery. Intensely emotional, the author looks at her grief, anger, and regret straight in the eye, and that ability to engage, articulate, and speak those internal experiences, however painful and frightening, is immensely courageous and strength giving.The book moves through several sections that build on each other. The first section of the book interrogates the notion of self: what is the self and what is other. The opening poem, "Artless" meditates on love: "Artless / is my heart. A stranger / berry there never was, / tartless. // Gone sour in the sun, / in the sunroom or moonroof, / roofless." In this poem, the heart, the poet's self, her life, are all objects which she can interrogate: "Heart, what are you? / War, star part?" She is intensely aware of the heart's failings, "fatted from the day, / overripe and even toxic at eve." But recognizing that it is a spectacular organ no less: "fighting fire with fire, / flightless. // That loud hub of us, /meat stub of us, beating us / senseless." There is mystery about this heart that exhausts itself for no purpose. Like love, it needs no motivation to keep going. "Liquid Flesh," a poem that dwells on the mother-child relationship, acknowledges the strong bond between mother and child, like one flesh that blends into the other, but also how uneasy this relationship is, with the mother wanting to hold on to her own identity, like "a chicken who still wants to be all potential."Recognizing the failings of the self and the reality it lives in, the second section, DOUBLE LIFE, entertains the idea of a parallel existence in which one might live the life one wishes for. "There is always an alternative world, an Andromeda," says the poet, "a secret world, the hidden draft, the tumor sibling, the 'there are no accidents." In "It Never Happened," the poet takes a drive to that parallel universe when she imagines taking home someone she likes rather than returning him to his wife. Or she does take him home to his wife but he kisses her before going in. It is difficult to figure out which part is imagined and which part is real, and what is imagined seems real. The fake distinction between the imagined and real is directly stated in "Kareoke Realness at the Love Hotel": "What's not paste or fake or false? / Or trick or replica / or denial or dream or drama / or simulation or reenactment / or knockoff or artificial, a ruse / a work of art, illusion, / a lie, mistake, fantasy, / a misconception, missed connection, / delusion, hallucination, / insincere, invalid, or invented, / a rehearsal with no performance?" What is real? Is not everything an illusion? And does not imagining something make it real? The act of writing is making something real, she affirms in "Miracles," "A scratch on the page / is a supernatural act, one twisting / fire out of water, blood out of stone. / We can read us. We are not alone."The third section, ARCANA, is a series of enigmatic poems derived from Tarot cards. Several of them explore the parallel lives of words, revealing the complexity and unfixedness of language. "The Hanged Man," question the ability of language to represent reality. "Judgment" contains the joke: "What did the stank of pines say to the herd of elephants wearing swimsuits and carrying large suitcases? ///'Nice trunks!'" Does "trunks" refer to tree trunks, swim trunks, elephant trunks, or suitcase trunks? Language is always one thing and then another simultaneously, the real and the imagined, the specified and alluded to. In "The Lovers," the poet says, "When you say I am beautiful/ suddenly I stop being so/ because you have claimed that." Is language so powerful that it can claim possession of something belonging to someone else? If so, then can it also claim grief and pain, taking power over one's emotions rather than letting them overpower oneself?In FAMILY TRIP, the realm of the imagined moves to the poet's relationships. In "I Wish I Had More Sisters", the poet's imaginary sisters serve as alter egos that could play out "all the ways I could have gone...without having to do the things myself." "My Water Children" also speaks of alternate selves but as children. Yet this desire to have a parallel or alternate life is not always a comfortable one. The ability to escape is hampered by the reality that escape is impossible, that no matter where one goes, one always takes with them that which one hopes to leaves behind. For example, in "Vacation," a respite to a tropical paradise is made uncomfortable with strange feelings and sights. The leaves are "little green lamps for the sunblind"; it is a struggle to find shade, one's ears are corked by water and earwax, the cerulean weather has "its yellow talons." In "Cover the Lamp with Its Own Light," the speaker keeps affirming her lack of expectations, yet that affirmation itself seems like an attempt to compensate. "I am not ungrateful," she says, "I will not wish for two things and then use the third to wish for three more....I am not greedy....I am not the wisher that I am," and so forth. The statements are opposite of the sentiments expressed so far, and her need to say them feels like a kind of struggle, an effort to make real what isn't real through speaking. The section concludes with "Vanity," in which the poet acknowledges that "in spite of the spot-checking, the self-seeking, the meticulous soul-smithing, I am still me, lacking."The final section of the book, OUR ANDROMEDA, reckons with the ultimate source of grief, the injury to a child at birth that results in permanent disability. In the long title poem, she tells the story of her son's birth, her guilt at not having brought him into the world safely, her anger at God, and reactions of her friends who were and weren't able to sympathize. She imagines an alternate world where her son is whole, able to have a normal childhood, the doctors are competent, and the mother has the chance to do it all again. She moves through all the stages of grief: denial, guilt, anger, negotiation. She makes the most painful confessions: "I can blame just about anyone for what happened to you, but ultimately it was my job to get you into this world safely. And I failed"; and the depth of her grief: "If I ate something sweet I would begin to cry, overwhelmed by how small comfort had become."But after allowing herself to express her grief and creating this alternative world in which mother and son thrives, she rejects that fantasy. She moves beyond wishful thinking to recognize that no matter how wonderful her imaginings, they cannot compare to her living, actual child, who survived, is hers, and is perfect in his own way. She says, "I was wrong to mourn so, he deserves better and so forth. You are better. Better than any lesser truth I could invent." Everyone, her friends, her family, and herself, were wrong. They did not need to be "so sorry" and "so sad" for Cal. After all, he was born, a fact in itself miraculous as Andromeda, and just as beautiful. The last poem speaks to the theme of the rest of the poem, that we are all hopelessly flawed and lacking, but love is perfect. Andromeda is inside us, she says, and here, in the Milky Way, with all its imperfections, is where we belong.Our Andromeda is a brave and necessary work. It takes one of the most difficult circumstances that the human heart can face and teaches us how to move through desire and devastation into love and joy. Its triumph over grief is earned. The gift we have been given is nothing less than a guidebook through the terrifying country of grief, but the poet shows the way with love, and brings us confidently, safely home.

I'm assuming the (currently) 6 other reviews (all 5 star) are the author's poet friends and/or family.

I loved this collection of poetry: it made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me want to sit down and start writing my own poems. Fiercely feminine, utterly fearless, completely honest. Wonderful.