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November
2007
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Praise
for In For Girls (& Others), Shanna Compton comman-deers the prim, repressed language of antique advice books for girls and deftly manipulates it into sub-version. Compton shows that while the style of these books is outmoded, the constricting messages they espouse are still, unfortunately, very much the norm. This collection made me laugh; it made me angry; it made me not shave my legs today. --
Recommended by "'For Girls,' the first of the two sequences that make up the book, responds to, reacts against and takes many phrases from an 1882 'health manual' with the same title: its advice on fashion, bodies and morals gives rise, in Compton's hands, to quirky but politically pointed verse. 'Comedy of Manners,' the second sequence, [...] hints of romantic narrative, frequent sarcasm, riffs on found texts and ambitious range of diction (from elaborate to vulgar) all serve Compton's consistent interest in how and whether the culture will ever let girls grow up." —Publishers Weekly "The text of the poems [in For Girls (& Others)], culled from a variety of other sources as well, presents an unceasing attack on female humanity for the sake of perceived femininity (“never let them see you perspire”). The prevailing and unabashed objectification of women should not come as a surprise in a text that predates universal suffrage, however Compton makes her point inside the many surviving prejudices. When Britney Spears shearing her golden locks is followed with such intense public zeal, surely the unwritten gender rules continue to be heeded. Using this critique as her context, Compton delivers the unexpected other side of the coin, reaching beyond the politics on the surface and delivering delicately crafted and amusing poems." —ArtVoice Praise
for "Compton's playfulness is lively, aphoristic and strange. [...] Down Spooky is an impressive, imaginative debut of linguistic fireworks with the distorted familiarity of a yearbook photo" —American Poet She is that rare creature, an exuberant minimalist: though few of her poems are longer than a page, they are compressed and crammed with wordplay and wit. 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. —Publishers Weekly So very many of Shanna Compton’s poems are brilliant, perfectly crafted & even surprising, even as they occur within a formal palette we’ve lived with for four decades now. You can get famous writing this well, and Compton very likely will. Even more important, from my point of view, are the pieces that show her going beyond her initial frame of reference, [those which harken] back to Creeley’s use of the quatrain & Zukofsky’s sense of the hard-edged line in ways that I’ve seldom seen accomplished before. —Ron Silliman Playful
messing with expectation is par for her course, but to the extent that
—Gary Sullivan
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For
Girls 
Shanna
Compton is the author of Down Spooky (Winnow, 2005),
Scurrilous Toy (Dusie Kollektiv, 2007), Big Confetti
(with Shafer Hall, Half Empty/Half Full, 2004), and the editor of GAMERS:
Artists, Writers & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels (Soft
Skull, 2004). Her poems and essays have appeared widely in magazines
such as No Tell Motel, MiPoesias, Verse, the tiny, McSweeney's,
Absent, Coconut, Spork, and Court Green, and in anthologies
including The Best American Poetry 2005, The Bedside Guide to No
Tell Motel, Bowery Women, Digerati, and Exchange Values Vol.
2. She lives in New Jersey. For more information, see