Culture October 1, 2012

In the Poetics, Aristotle divides history from poetry: History relates what has happened, whereas poetry tells what may happen. It is the friction between these two spheres—the actual, so-called real world, versus the world of possibles, a parallel universe, the realm of dream, of imagination and of perception, that double-world where our other selves are constantly splitting off from us through the choices and chances we never took—that powers Brenda Shaughnessy’s magnificent, monumental new book of poems.