Brenda Shaughnessy

  • What to Read When You Want to Write Like a Mother

    What to Read When You Want to Write Like a Mother

    A list of books that wrangle, directly or indirectly, with motherhood and all that comes with it (or its absence).

  • The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound

    The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound

    Maybe I can touch it and show it to you. If I convince you, we can call it real. And then perhaps it will be.

  • Fear and Loathing

    For Lambda Literary, Christopher Soto talks with Brenda Shaughnessy about her new collection of poetry and how she relates to her writing as someone who is already four collections in. She outlines the ways in which her work has been…

  • Ordinary Days of Grandeur

    Don’t miss the weekly staff picks over at the Paris Review. Lorin Stein recommends Brenda Shaughnessy’s soulful and stripped down So Much Synth, Jeffery Gleaves praises “mother writer” Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, and Caitlin Youngquist writes of Bernadette Mayer’s Works…

  • My Sister’s Legs

    My Sister’s Legs

    Because that’s how it is with sisters. You are them. You are not them. You are broken shards from the same pane of glass, each reflecting a different light.

  • Notable NYC: 5/31–6/6

    Saturday 5/31: Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, Ethan Hauser, and Paul Rome have a conversation with publishing insiders Katie Raissian, Erin Harris, and Brittney Inman Canty. Bittersweet (May 2014), Beverly-Whittmore’s new novel, is about a girl and her roommate at a prestigious East…

  • Notable NYC: 5/10–5/16

    Saturday 5/10: Stephen Boyer and Holly Pester join the Segue Series. Boyer compiled the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Rachel Kushner and Rob Spillman discuss The Flamethrowers (2013), Kushner’s novel set in the 1970s New…

  • Notable NYC: 1/18–1/24

    Saturday 1/18: Ed Steck and Anselm Berrigan join the Segue Reading Series. Steck’s first collection, The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and SImulation (2013), is partly composed from a military intelligence technical text. Berrigan has collaborated with painter Jonathan Allen…

  • Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy

    Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy

    In her new collection, Our Andromeda, Brenda Shaughnessy presents emotions at their most bare in experiences both familiar and alien—and alien sometimes in a literal sense as the speakers regularly shuttle to and from the Andromeda Galaxy, the galaxy closest…

  • National Poetry Month Day 2: “At the Book Shrink” by Brenda Shaughnessy

    Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April. At the Book Shrink one learns to say “my body uses me as a grape…

  • Jazzy Danziger: The Last Poem I Loved, “Epithalament” by Brenda Shaughnessy

    Contrary to popular belief, language is not flat, passionless, clichéd and dying, and if you disagree, it’s imperative that you read Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “Epithalament” as soon as possible. Language must be “weirded” if it’s going to make the ordinary…