Brink (Paperback or Softback)

"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

The Brooklyn-based Compton (downspooky) already enjoys some reputation among hipsters, but this third volume is all sorts of breakthrough: in two restrained sequences and two sets of wild, outré, funny stand-alone lyrics, Compton does as much as anyone yet to represent the way her youngish people live now, the alterable, friable, quizzical, digital, comical voice of a plugged-in, sexed-out, and reluctantly but unmistakably political cohort. "My boyfriends unfortunately lack lasers," she complains in a poem called "I Love Men": "thanks to the dulling force of the obvious,/ she LOLs in her cube." Flattened by adult clichés, she (or her temporary mask) declares "Let us creep apart from them… I will continue to say dishabille/ as scantily as I envision it." The poems modulate up and down in their kinds of language, from online slang to quiet advice, and from slow, choppy free verse to a sped-up kind with "many a dimpled inflorescence." It's showy, but justifies the show it puts on as a way to depict our quick-change emotions, our (or her, or perhaps her peers') difficulty in settling down: and any reader who thinks Compton's shorter poems shallow, too in thrall to fluidity and experiment, should quiet down and wise up in the last, saddest sequence, a set of not-quite-sonnets about a not-quite-breakup: "She's in one room, he's in another/ and the environment is total winter… they might mix like unlucky elements/ and ignite." (July)