Reviews for Human Dark with Sugar

The average rating for Human Dark with Sugar based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-22 00:00:00 Michele Zaino This book is the chick-lit of poetry. Brenday Shaunnessy is great at the art of disconnection to others but also offers nothing of redeeming value that you can take with you after a five minute read. There is a street smartness about her work. Then there is the smartness gained by reading, intellectual curiosity and emotional intelligence that is not reflected anywhere. Lines like: "Throw your love until it sticks." or, "At our miserable dinner even my own chewing disgusted me." reek of sit-com one-liners and humor. She speaks of "vulnerable as a lemon-peel" and how "we need a poet for the nanosecond" as if this was the future of American poetry. What she has to offer is: "a heart as hard and small and uni-purpose as a tack." I think that describes her poetry as well. That this book won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American poets, bodes ill for American Poetry and and the rest of us who give a damn.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-11-30 00:00:00 Craig Fowler Often times when I (I was going to say peruse, but I don't think that's casual enough...) wander through the poetry section of the library I'll pull out a book or two... or however many it takes, until one grabs me. This book did just that. After casually looking at some of the lines in the poems, I thought I had a smash hit. It's a strange book though. While many of the individual lines of the poem are clutch, I rarely felt like that about her poems when taken as a whole. I mean, who wouldn't think "Why do we only get two years in exchage for three summers? A full year stolen by mosquitoes." or "what world is made, that made us that we keep/ making and making to replace the dreaming at last./ Stop the terrible dreaming." are great lines? I certainly thought they were. But I wasn't reading a book of lines. I was reading a book of poems.