Brenda Shaughnessy & Amy Key

Brenda Shaughnessy’s Liquid Flesh (Bloodaxe) gathers together poems from across her first five collections, as thrilling and unpredictable as any contemporary American poet. Writing about her work in the Boston Review, Richard Howard says that ‘when anything is as fresh as this diction, as free as these associations, as fraught as these passions, it is not descriptions or definitions which are wanted but the thing itself, the new words in new places, the necessary instigations’.

Shaughnessy read from Liquid Flesh and was in conversation with Amy Key, whose second collection, Isn’t Forever, came out with Bloodaxe in 2018, and whose latest book, Arrangements in Blue, came out from Jonathan Cape earlier this year.