Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy
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, of the roads not taken—that powers Brenda Shaughnessy’s magnificent, monumental new book of poems. If elements of a recognizable reality make appearances in these pages, they are constantly being displaced, obscured, or clouded by leakage from somewhere else.
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.
Shaughnessy uses the concept of Andromeda in two ways. On the one hand, the name conjures