Brenda Shaughnessy is not afraid to admit fear. Her new collection, Human Dark with Sugar, praises doubt, rewards unanswered queries, and bleeds the line between speaker and poet. Those wary of emotion or in search of existential answers should back away slowly. Shaughnessy wears her heart dark with sugar on her sleeve and makes no apologies for such an indulgent and ultimately rewarding move. The collection’s poems calibrate magic and math, switch poetic devices in the eighth stanza, and challenge the western calendar, demanding to know: “Why do we only get two / years in exchange for three summers?”  

Shaughnesy organizes Human Dark with Sugar into three sections—“Anodyne,” “Ambrosia,” and “Astrolabe.” “Ambrosia” emits sensual, erotic overtones; “Anodyne” is underpinned by a scientific examination of the pedestrian, from beds to the color of snow; and “Astrolabe” gives measure to embarrassment, solitude, and human connectivity. Classic themes of love, perception of time, and sex overlap within these sections, informing one another. At their intersection is Shaughnessy’s formation of new logics. She begins breaking down sexuality and gender frameworks in the collection’s initial poem:

From “I’m Over the Moon”—
The sun is worth ten of you.
You don’t hold a candle
to that complexity, that solid craze.
Like an animal carcass on the road at night,
picked at by crows,
haunting walkers and drivers. Your face
regularly sliced up by the moving
frames of car windows. 

The speaker exiles herself from the moon—a traditional symbol of femininity and fertility. This symbolic cleaving articulates Shaughnessy’s pursuit: to find a new organization or template to see the world. She achieves this through strict stanza formation—her poems structured around couplets or tercets, their sections numbered:

From “Three Sorries”—
1.  I’m Sorry
I hid your life vest in the death trap on purpose, my love.
I’d hoped you’d die, and in this way, live.  Sorry.
…
2. Don’t Be Sorry
Keep doing it!
Make the read lead ball float on the black
snow of a small man’s monstrous land.
…
3. How can I not be?
You make me sound so bad. At our miserable dinner
even my own chewing disgusted me, as if I’d borrowed
myself from you, with a weak smile. I promise I’ll give it back.

The amount of sections increases throughout Human Dark with Sugar. “This Loved Body” catalogues a lover’s body in twenty sections, from the everyday “shoulder curve in Möbius,” to the questioned voice—“The voice, is it a part of the body?”—to pubic hair “as carefully plotted as an English garden.”

            Shaughnessy’s power is her ability to render her humanity. In Human Dark with Sugar, she plays no highbrow games of academic hide-and-seek. Rather, using her own name, she highlights authorial placement within these poems. In “Sorry, T.,” she explains: “I’m a ghost. Do you understand / that the person you love / is fleshy and heavy from hip / to boot to make up for this? / There’s a name for it: Brenda.” It becomes difficult to separate Brenda Shaughnessy, the poet, from the speaker of her poems. 

While poems like “First Date and Still Very, Very Lonely” play the heartstrings with a bittersweet twang, Shaughnessy is at her best when she camouflages her vulnerability with a scrim of confidence.

From “I’m Perfect at Feelings”—
Certain loves were perfect
in the daytime and had every
right to express carnally behind
the copy machine and there are
no hard feelings for the boozy
sodomy and sorry XX daisy chains,
whenever it felt right for you.
...
It’s okay, you’re an innocent
with the brilliance of an animal.
stuffing yourself sick on a kill.
Don’t, don’t feel like the runt alien
on my ship: I get you. I know
the dimensions of your wishing
and losing and don’t think you
a glutton with petty beefs.

The more confidence Shaughnessy exudes, the more tangible her vulnerability becomes. She becomes more identified with “the kill” rather than the “I” despite earlier tendencies in the collection. This evolves further as Shaughnessy sheds her human skin, taking on the voice of the insects. In “No Such Thing as One Bee,” she asks: “Do I look like a bee? / One cell of a hiveswarm / individually striped. / Using winter as a way / to act as an egg / among many, a potential / sameness.” Later, in “Moth Death on the Windowsill,” she writes: “1. Moth’s Last Words to You / Being sexy is so important to humans, it’s repulsive / but what’s not to love? The way you pay in warm / soft cash, erasing cigarettes so coolly. Plus you’re so big.”

The metamorphosis of Shaughnessy’s voice into animal identity arranges the most direct meaning from the collection’s human hang-ups, conflicts, and unanswered queries. While much of Shaughnessy’s strength as poet derives from her naked humanity, it’s from a distanced perspective that she truly tears into the marrow of Human Dark with Sugar’s broader conflicts and celebrations. 

Compared to Interior With Sudden Joy—Shaughnessy’s first collection—Human Dark with Sugar establishes a more direct and accessible tone, despite glimmers of her old poetics peeking through, such as in “Spring in Space: A Lecture,” when she implores: “Under your costume I’m naked and the pretty / wind for cooling / the south salts me everywhere.  Your hands / find me where there is no science, / only precision. I could sleep for days / without a map.” However, Shaughnessy’s experimental syntax and nostalgia—in this collection—provide a sumptuous sinking rather than a drowning bombardment. For those willing to jump ship, Shaughnessy has, this time, provided life-vests with a rescue boat in clear sight.

 Despite the clarity of Human Dark with Sugar, Shaughnessy’s worldview constantly morphs. Within the poems she claims parthenogenesis, changes into a bleeding ghost, and refuses the role of poet. In “Why is the Color of Snow?” she writes: “What kind of poetry is all question, anyway? / Each question leads to an iceburn, / a snownova, a single bed spinning in space. / Poet, decide! I am lonely with questions.”

One would like to answer Shaughnessy’s pleas, but Human Dark with Sugar’s quest for logic, ragged introspection, and well-timed vulnerability leaves one wanting more of her questions, not the banality of their supposed answers.