Music underlies many of the poems in Brenda Shaughnessy's So Much Synth. "Synth" refers to both the '80s music of groups like Duran Duran, Eurythmics and Simple Minds, which figure into several poems, and the neurological condition synesthesia, in which the stimulation of one sense triggers a reaction in another. Though many poets play with the senses of sight and sound, Shaughnessy (Human Dark with Sugar; Our Andromeda) particularly relishes made-up words, internal and near rhymes, or visually broken lines to reveal her thoughts. In "Last Sleep, Best Sleep," for example, she describes "The great fruits of my failure:/ silk milk pills with little bitter pits" and then tosses in the knowing aside: "Who talks like that?"
Inherent to So Much Synth is Shaughnessy's passionate, funny, hipster, feminist take on growing up. The young narrator living in a "lesbian loft" in "But I'm the Only One" strings together the tenants' comings and goings. The protagonist of the skillful poem about female adolescence "Is There Something I Should Know?" runs through every girl's angst about sex, menstruation, pop music, popularity ("The middle was always for losers. The middle seat,/ the middle-aged, the middle child, the middle finger,/ middle school, middling."). She describes the anxious anticipation of adulthood: "what it was really like to become a woman/ made me rather expect a kind of slow, gorgeous/ liquefaction after which I'd emerge a cross/ between Jessica Rabbit and Denise Huxtable." In So Much Synth, Shaughnessy writes with a mature sense of herself--both as she was and as she is. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.