Book excerpt: The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry "The next illogical step in love poetry The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world always do sound like diseases. It is because they are engorged. G., I am a fool. What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us. Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened. Caresses." --from "Dear Gonglya," At once hyper-contemporary and archaic, erotic, indecorous, and extravagant like nobody else, Brenda Shaughnessy seeks outrageous avenues of access to the heart, "This strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt."