In her second collection, Shanna Compton leads readers on a lightly satirical tour through various works of advice for young women, including antique etiquette manuals, pseudoscientific physiology textbooks, 19th-century sermons, contemporary newspaper cl

For Girls & Others

Literature & Fiction

Compton, Shanna

Poetry

Bloof Books

"Shanna Compton captures the weird and dazzling collision between the suffering and the awe of contemporary existence. At once disturbing and triumphant, the poems in Brink work together to create an honest, unexpected, and fascinating lyrical exhibition of the complicated human heart." --Ada Limón "Shanna Compton is one of those poets I will always read, will always eagerly anticipate the next brilliant collection! Brink is a word we gather on top of. Not every poet can promise this word, but it's most fitting here." --CAConradIn her third collection, Shanna Compton offers poems for our brink times: As Texas burns, the Midwest drowns. As one planet explodes, Curiosity captures stunning panoramas of Mars. As one couple argues, another sinks into the silent depths of an ocean trench. The poems in Brink explore the slippage between our lives and the sensation of living inside a miniseries, insistently assuring us we're still solidly here, "amidst all this news."

Brink

Poetry. "This collection is, from the get-go, parenthetical, by which I mean layered horizontally in voice, architecture, inflection, and sound--the sound of the ever-fading world, and the soundtrack of the human interior. The tone is a shimmering dread with a backbeat of wonder, and the reigning approach to the line is the caesura--gaps, silence, and redactions. Everything teeters, transmogrifies; even the speaker's dress shifts from 'delicate bushbean pink' to 'tufted crest titmouse gray' and then into something like song: 'My dress my dress / o mess of shabbiness...' Shanna Compton has managed to write poems that are utterly of the moment--'Oh vomitous intimacy!'-- while harkening back to archetype, to the timeless strangeness of the natural world, imagination's source: 'the river / the gold-green blur of trees,' steadying, sweet, a 'clear rivulet of water across the sandy waste.' This collection met my thirst right where it lives. 'Fellow navigators,' I urge you to read it."--Diane Seuss "Poems in (CREATURE SOUNDS FADE) slip through cracks into other worlds a little unfamiliar and they insist on the urgency of making what is unfamiliar familiar. You have to see how these poems sound in your head. As private and public exchange places with one another, we're let in to Compton's poems, we're invited to provide the variable."--Dara Wier "Shanna Compton's poems turn corners you wouldn't know were there if she weren't listening for them, locating them in order to give them away, listening to what's there and what's left out. Her astonishing feel, sound by sound, for shapeliness sprung from the edges and detail of lived experience, and her intense commitment to deep listening, are antidotes for and tough pushback against the constant threat of total immobility we all face every day."--Anselm Berrigan

(CREATURE SOUNDS FADE)

Black Lawrence Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Compton, Shanna. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Compton, Shanna

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Compton, Shanna. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

For Girls & Others

Brink

(CREATURE SOUNDS FADE)