Tanya

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.