12 Quotes by Brenda Shaughnessy

Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake.

And now we eat. The eponymous eating. Don’t want butter, don’t want salt. Dinner is thinner but it’s not my fault.

I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.