(CREATURE SOUNDS FADE) now available for preorder

Cover painting: “until the end of the world” by Kim Kimbro

It has a cover! And I love it.

Everything is weird & all my launch events have been canceled or postponed indefinitely, but I am nevertheless excited and grateful the book is still coming out as planned.

I hope you will take a look, and consider preordering a copy. Preorders are a few bucks off, and remain the very best way to support small presses.

Preorder from Black Lawrence

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, silences, 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

You can read more about it here.

Upcoming readings & appearances

Shanna Compton reading at Stain Bar in Brooklyn. She is wearing a yellow dress and holding a book, under a blue spotlight.

Full details on the calendar page.

POSTPONED: SAN ANTONIO, TX

Saturday, March 7, 10–4
Whale Prom Alternative Bookfair

Offsite during AWP 2020
Brick at Blue Star
108 Blue Star

POSTPONED: PANEL & POETRY FESTIVAL: ROSEMONT, PA

Saturday, April 4, 2:30–4
LitLife Poetry Conference
Panel: Developing a Manuscript

Hirsch Community Center
Rosemont College

CANCELED: BOOKFAIR & POETRY FESTIVAL: NEW ORLEANS, LA

Saturday & Sunday, April 18–19, 9–5
New Orleans Poetry Festival Bookfair

New Orleans Healing Center
2372 St Claude

CANCELED :READING & RECEPTION EVENT: HADDONFIELD, NJ

Saturday, April 25, time TK
with Tom McAllister & others TBD

Inkwood Books
31 Kings Hwy East

Creature Sounds Fade will be published in 2020 by Black Lawrence Press

One of the poems in the collection is called "The Vulture." Color illustration of vulture eating a snake from page 48 of "A general history of birds" (1821)
One of the poems in the collection is called “The Vulture.” Image from page 48 of A General History of Birds (1821), courtesy of Internet Archive Books Images at Flickr.

Big news! My collection of new poems, Creature Sounds Fade, has been picked up by Black Lawrence Press from their 2018 Open Reading Period. It’s scheduled for July 2020.

At their request, I wrote a bit about the title and how the book came together:

Creature sounds is a term used by SFX designers: it can refer to any animal or monster sound. Growls, snarls, hisses, howls, and roars, but also smaller sounds like lip smacks, breathing, and wounded crying. Sound designers take snippets of real-world sound from one context, rework them, and recontextualize them for wholly different effects somewhere else.

I began gradually losing my hearing in my twenties due to a genetic condition, a fade that eventually necessitated hearing aids and other assistive technology, such as captioning. When I first got the aids, I realized how much I’d been missing. The blinker clacking in the car, a dog barking a block away, and especially birds. These things that had gradually faded from my experience were suddenly and beautifully back. I don’t remember now what movie I was watching, but when “[creature sounds fade]” appeared on the screen, I scrambled to write it down as a title. It also happens to describe some of my process—the poems often start with or incorporate snippets from elsewhere like this: a caption, a bit of overheard speech (especially something I’ve misheard), stray phrases from another text.

You can read the rest of the artist statement and three poems from the collection here.

I’m thrilled to be working with Diane Goettel at Black Lawrence on this new book. More about it as the date gets closer!

For Girls & Other Poems gets a new look

In September my second book (2008), For Girls & Other Poems, was redesigned/reissued for its tenth birthday! It’s now available with a new cover, updated interior design, and a few minor corrections. Here’s the new look:

Praise for For Girls

“This technique always has exactly a feminist cunning, and always a feminist heritage (the Baronness, Acker). We steal shit. It’s not okay. This is a book made from elegant defiance.” —Anne Boyer

“There were a lot a terrific books in 2007, but this was by far one of my FAVORITES! Incorporating the antique book (and antique ideas) for girls. If you don’t buy this book you can only IMAGINE what I mean!” —CAConrad

“Though Shanna Compton’s second full-length book will probably get noticed first for its quasi-gender studies focus, the ironic tone and muscularly discursive lines of For Girls (& Others) mark it as first-rate poetry first, a lesson in articulating individual identity in a public sphere. Compton owns her project—a kind of contemporary primer for girls that, in revealing how far we’ve come, indicates we haven’t strayed far enough from the ideas of the 19th-century handbook that serves as impetus for some of the poems. Luckily, we have Compton’s voice to help guide us. Lingustic virtuosity is a solid draw as well. Those who’ve read Compton’s first collection, Down Spooky, already know her to be adept at torquing language in a way that reveals not simply multiple meanings, but multiple registers. Throughout, Compton uses syntax and lineation to provide some of the punch. Simultaneously reverent and irreverent, For Girls (& Others) is a complex work on identity and the forces we all work against to assert it.” —Rain Taxi

About the book

Cover collage

Includes portions of the following public domain artwork and advertising: Bacchante with Ape (1627, Hendrick ter Brugghen, digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program), Yardley English Complexion Cream ad (1948, as it appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal), Endocreme ad (1948, as it appeared in Life).

For Girls (Part One)

“Preface” is lifted verbatim from For Girls: A Special Physiology, by Mrs. E. R. Shepherd, an popular health manual for girls and young women first published in 1882 by Fowler & Wells and reprinted through the 1890s in more than twenty subsequent editions. The worn, mustard-yellow, hardbound copy that inspired my parody is a gift from my mother, who found it funny when she ran across it in an antique store. An 1891 edition is available online at <http://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:2573459$1i>. Though they are not found poems, most of the rest of the pieces in this sequence borrow their titles and/or other phrases from the same book, heavily remixed and freely recontextualized.

Comedy of Manners (Part Two)

The poems in this section also frequently beg, borrow, or steal, from sources ranging the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries: gardening manuals, adventure periodicals, sermons, etiquette books, religiously inflected medical texts, promotional pamphlets for household products, a clip art catalog, art criticism, newspapers, and the Internet.

You can get it from Bloof Books here.

If you’d like a signed copy, I’m always happy to do that. Email me. Since much of this book’s awful advice is aimed at teen girls & young women, it would make an apt gift for a niece or daughter who’s into words, especially if she’s got a sense of humor & a strong sense of herself. (She has.)

Incoming

Got some very exciting poetry news recently, which I should be able to share later this month.

I haven’t been blogging like I thought I might, since quitting FB in March.

I have, however, been writing a lot more, at work on my book-length poem. It’s undergone a massive reorganization, which it needed, and I spent several weeks this summer getting all the notes for unwritten portions into one master Scrivener file, and lately I’ve been writing new pieces for it again. The Book as Lyric Experiment panel we did at &NOW was helpful—hearing Jennifer (Firestone), Emily (Carr), & Catie (Rosemurgy) talk about and read from their projects was illuminating, and articulating my own process and how this poem is different from my other work was too. That has been the bulk of my learning curve—how to sustain the energy and spin out the narrative structure. It’s taken a lot more behind the scenes organization than I am used to building, to keep it from wandering off. (I let the short poems generally wander where they like, having no plan at all beforehand, usually.)

It turns out it’s not unusual for a long-form project to take this long, they said. And each of them works only this way, vs. writing shorter standalone poems, so they would know. The first pieces are 2009, and I realized it was going to be a long-form thing at some point in 2010. The first “complete draft,” which of course was not complete, was “done” in 2012. And here I am still writing it. I can see the end from here though, this time. It’s a much better (and weirder) book than it was in that first awkward draft. I’ve been reading from it some too, most recently last month at KGB.

I have some of the shorter poems forthcoming in the meantime—Shock of the Femme, Bone Bouquet, Bennington Review, Oversound, the Couter-Desecrations anthology. I’ll post about those and the aforementioned Big News as things pop into the open.

Most of my leisure reading has been in service to this poem too, but not all. Right now I’m reading this, which is terrific. (Just like everything I’ve read from Dorothy so far.)

This poem by Rosmarie Waldrop is the most exquisite thing I experienced this week.

Followed by this rainy river view last night.

O, what’s this? I think I have blogged!