Petrushka by Keith O’Shaughnessy

Set in a quasi-Russian dreamscape, the blackly comic, darkly beautiful poems and fables contained in this vast volume chronicle, in an elaborate symphonic arrangement of recurring themes and motifs, the miscellaneous travails of several interacting characters—ballerina, chess master, opera tenor, cabaret chanteuse (if not, too, the odd street urchin, idiot, or organ grinder)—all under the vigilant glare of the anarchically violent, subversively vulgar Petrushka puppet thwacking away savagely at his various adversaries with his beloved slapstick. By turns elegant, satirical, and absurd, the collection, like its namesake, revels throughout in the perverse and grotesque, yet always with mischievous wit and rhetorical invention.

In 2011 Keith O’Shaughnessy’s first book of poems, Incommunicado, won the inaugural Grolier Discovery Award, sponsored by the legendary poetry bookshop on Harvard Square of the same name. His second, Last Call for Ganymede, followed in 2014 from Ilora Press. Along the way he also authored three chapbooks, all with Pudding House Publications. His third full-length collection, Petrushka, is out this Spring from Ragged Sky Press. A lifelong resident of Princeton, he teaches English at Camden County College in southern New Jersey.