Interior with Sudden Joy introduces a poet at once hyper-contemporary and archaic, erotic, indecorous, and extravagant like nobody else. Brenda Shaughnessy's poems seek outrageous avenues of access - funny, vernacular, ulterior - to the heart, "this strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt." This first collection is the next illogical step in love poetry.