Brink

by Shanna Compton

In 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 survives their hundredth argument, another slips 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 collects shorter poems and two sequences. A long poem called "The Seam" is forthcoming in a companion volume next year.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2012

About the author

Shanna Compton’s most recent book is Creature Sounds Fade, published by Black Lawrence Press in November 2020. She is also the author of Brink (Bloof, 2013), For Girls Other Poems (Bloof, 2008), Down Spooky (Open Book Award Winner, Winnow, 2005), and several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays are widely published, appearing in Best American Poetry, the Nation, American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere.

Shanna works as a book designer for independent authors and small presses, and creates visual art as a printmaker and collagist. She lives on the Delaware River in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Reviews

[Mike Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems of living between complicated gazes in houses that sit on top of wheezing sciences and next to noun-y flora. Often skips the name of a feeling for the name of a feeling's feeling, like you would skip a sigh of recognition for an even more particular sigh.

[Sarah Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good stuff here. One of my favorite lines:

"Anyway,
when I said before it didn’t exist

I didn’t lie. It’s just that
I had my eyes closed"

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brink by Shanna Compton, from Bloof Books, 2012 -- i like the world/s created, i liked inhabiting the poems. a variety of free verse styles (plus a rhyming poem!). Voices, interiors, awareness. "Personal Use" is kinda breaking my heart.