Deep Whoosh by Shanna Compton (Black Square Editions)
Creature Sounds Fade by Shanna Compton (Black Lawrence Press)

The cover of Midwinter Constellation, edited by Becca Klaver. The design consists of cream-colored hand-drawn stars and loops on a pale aqua background with cream text.

Midwinter Constellation

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Midwinter Constellation was written by Stephanie Anderson, Hanna Andrews, Julia Bloch, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Shanna Compton, Mel Coyle, Marisa Crawford, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Arielle Greenberg, Jenny Gropp, Stefania Heim, MC Hyland, erica kaufman, Becca Klaver, Caolan Madden, Pattie McCarthy, Monica McClure, Jenn Marie Nunes, Danielle Pafunda, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Khadijah Queen, Linda Russo, Katie Jean Shinkle, Evie Shockley, Sara Jane Stoner, Dawn Sueoka, Bronwen Tate, Catherine Wagner, Elisabeth Workman, and Mia You.

On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s writing of Midwinter Day, 32 women poets typed into Google Docs titled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Following the six-part structure of Mayer’s book, they composed alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. Midwinter Constellation is the result. Part patchwork quilt, part collective consciousness, the book hopes “to prove the day like the dream has everything in it,” as Mayer wrote in 1978, and to extend her vision into a global 21st-century everyday.

A radical experiment in collective writing, the book embroiders, echoes, and blurs the voices of poets across the U.S. and beyond. They wake up in bed together and spend the day writing while nursing babies, grading papers, driving home for the holidays, making meals, and gathering in bookstores and living rooms to read Midwinter Day aloud. While threads of identity can be traced through the repeated names of children, highways, books, and pets, Midwinter Constellation declines to identify who’s speaking when, exceeding the territory of authorship and rejecting the illusion that we are separate.

Cover of Brink with multistriped pyramid on green background, white title and author name.

Brink

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“There is nothing quite like this exuberance, on the edge of paraphrasable sense but not over it, among Compton’s contemporaries, though many of them have tried. Compton takes it upon herself to make everything interesting, to make daily life spark and fizz.” —Stephanie Burt, Yale Review

“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

“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.” —Publishers Weekly

“In Brink, Compton flirts with disaster on every page, constantly teetering on the edge of complete chaos and devastation. Compton can mingle the otherworldly alongside the common stings of this world. These stoically stated observations feel so precise and accurate: they are like the surgeon’s tiny scalpel peeling back layers of the complicated and revolting human heart. These poems will teach you how to chuckle at devastation as much as they will teach you to fear it.” —Anne Champion, Pank Magazine

For Girls & Other Poems

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“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

Down Spooky

(SOLD OUT)

“Down Spooky is as enchanting as a blue lake on a hot summer day that you never want to get out of once you’ve plunged in. The book brims with liveliness, and love, and wit. Shanna Compton has an uncanny gift of seizing moments and situations with sure aplomb, and even when she is reveling in word play—in purely verbal speculation—her words lead to insight. Readers can only be grateful for such beneficent interventions.” —Harry Mathews

“The first line of her bio says it all, really: ‘Born and raised in Texas, Shanna Compton has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1995.’ She combines West and East, bringing an acute sense of place (places, rather: the Duane Reade and the BQE; St. John Parish in Louisiana and a high school band parade in Texas) reminiscent of C.D. Wright. But like Wright (or Caroline Knox, who contributes a blurb to the back cover), Compton’s truest allegiance is to words and their uncanny ability to manufacture a community of meanings out of the barest possible contexts. The speed of her associations produces a kind of delirious whiplash in the reader.” —Joshua Corey

“Vigorous, winningly smart and consistently hip, Compton’s debut follows a horde of quick-witted alter egos through a decidedly American, youth-oriented landscape whose sites include high schools, zoos, the football fields of Texas, the kudzu-damaged forests of the rural South, the skyscrapers of post-9/11 Manhattan and the rock and roll lounges of innermost Brooklyn. Compton, who just ended a long stint as associate editor at Soft Skull Press, portrays the pleasures and fears of her generation with ‘that hookymaking/convincibility of mine,’ deploying a quick-change lingo of ‘Slashy Speakers, Nervy Endings’ in poems that veer in and out of narrative sense: she shows off a language equal parts angst and speed, with a soft spot for ‘the longing of the never-ringing telephones’ and repeated returns to runaway teens. Compton shows a particular talent for love poems à la C.D. Wright and D.A. Powell: ‘Your mouth is its own environment a canyon/ with trees and snow,’ an augmented sonnet proclaims; ‘lips that have smiled are as limitless as leaves.’ —Publishers Weekly

Anthologies

Please Add To This List: A Guide to Teaching Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets and Experiments, edited by Katy Bohinc
Cover of Counter-Desecrations: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed, with black lettering and a contemporary abstract painting on a red background.
Counter-Desecrations: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan, 2018)
Cover of Bound: The First Array, edited by Shanna Compton, showing three ivory paper cube sculptures in on a white backround with yellow title lettering.
Bound: The First Array (editor, Bloof Books, 2015)
Cover of Sixty Morning Talks, edited by Andy Fitch, a solid pale gray background with the title and editor's name and the number 12 in blue.
Sixty Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling, 2014)
Cover of The Incredible Sestina Anthology, edited by Daniel Nester, with a green and red patter of a spiral on a blue background.
The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013)
Cover of The Best American Poetry 2005, edited by Paul Muldoon, series editor David Lehman, with a painting by Alex Katz of a woman in a headscarf under an umbrella in the rain in a white border with a red background.
The Best American Poetry 2005 (Scribner, 2005)
Cover of Gamers: Artists, Writers & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels, edited by Shanna Compton, with a large red Space Invaders creature on black, with video-game lettering.
Gamers: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels (editor, Soft Skull, 2004)
Cover of The Bedside Guide to No-Tell Motel, edited by Reb Livingston and Molly Arden, with red-tinted photo of a woman's feet in heels and stockings on a bed and a motel-style sign reading No-Tell Motel, weekly rates, air-conditioned & cheap rooms, on a red and pink background.
The Bedside Guide to No-Tell Motel (No-Tell Books, 2006)
Cover of Poet's Bookshelf 2: Contemporary Poets on the Books That Shaped Their Air, edited by Peter Davis and Tom Koontz with green and purple lettering on an orange background.
Poet’s Bookshelf II: Contemporary Poets on the Books That Shaped Their Art (Barnwood, 2008)
Cover of Bowery Women anthology, with a black-and-white photo of a New York City building showing fire escapes and poets' faces in the windows, and a large group of women in color in standing in the foreground.
Bowery Women: Poems (YBK Publishers, 2006)
Cover of Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Digital World, edited by Steve Mueske, with handwriting on a parchment page.
Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World (Three Candles, 2006)

Chapbooks, Broadsides & Ephemera

An Urban Consolation for Gotham (Center for Book Arts, 2013). Letterpress broadside printed by Ana Paula Cordeiro, 100 copies, out of print.

A Proposed Explanation for a Phenomenon (Columbia College Chicago; Center for Book, Paper & Print; 2013). Letterpress broadside designed by Clifton Meador, printed by April Sheridan. Limited edition, out of print.

The Woman from the Public (2006). Letterpress broadside printed by the author at the Center for Book Arts, NYC. Unnumbered limited edition. Available here.

Rare Vagrants (Dusie, 2010). Wall-hanging accordion book, 40 copies, out of print. PDF available in Dusie: Spring 2010.

Scurrilous Toy (Dusie, 2007). Saddle-stapled, 100 copies, out of print. PDF available in Dusie: Summer 2007.

Closest Major Town (Half Empty-Half Full, 2006). Saddle-stapled, 50 copies, out of print.

Big Confetti with Shafer Hall (Half Empty-Half Full, 2004). Saddle-stapled, 300 copies, out of print.

Down Spooky (Half Empty-Half Full, 2004). Saddle-stapled, 300 copies, out of print.

Opal Memos Nonchalant with Shannon Holman & Jeffrey Salane (Half Empty-Half Full, 2002). Saddle-stapled, 150 copies, out of print.