(CREATURE SOUNDS FADE)

Author: Shanna Compton Publisher: Black Lawrence Press (2020) "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, silence, 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