BRINK
Shanna Compton

“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