“The latest title from Lambertville, New Jersey poet, artist and book designer Shanna Compton is (Creature Sounds Fade) (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a collection of poems predominantly built of single-page lyric narrative sketch-works, as multiple of her poems give the simultaneous impression of quick thought and deep consideration. Her poems move across the page at quite a speed, from a human interior to an exterior and engagement with landscape and eco-concerns, enough that the two seeming-poles become nearly indistinguishable. ‘The picked edges of the birches’ / bitter bark,’ she writes, to open the poem ‘Paper Trees,’ ‘Red-gold admixture / of mind a fleeting logical thread / she keeps tangling around / her spindle body [.]’ Compton plays with familiar landscapes and phrases fragmented and re-formed, twisting expectations and direction, constantly darting between lines, between trees, in an out of view in simultaneous outreach and retreat. Compton writes through a voice akin to something wild, something feral, one hesitant to step to far towards an encroaching array of human activity. “My love I am a tangled I am choked & salted,” she writes, to open “Shorn Fur,” “My love I am feeling the itch of the buds soon to burst from my skin [.]”
Read the rest: http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2020/12/shanna-compton-creature-sounds-fade.html
And the book is 40% off during Black Lawrence Press’s Holiday Sale! Use code HOLIDAY40 at checkout to receive this discount on all in-print titles through December. Link: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/creature-sounds-fade/