Shanna Compton

I want to look Shanna Compton's poems, especially the ones in Poemeleon. Her poem "The one she sent & the one she received" is just beautiful. She has this amazing way of nailing openings, and this one I think is excellent:

A pear, ripe enough to taste two rooms away.

A waxed pear, an idea of Pear.

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A lank of hair, tied with twine, enclosed in an envelope on which their names are written.



I'd also like to take a look at her poem "In half-asleep love" in Coconut volume one, which has this great undercurrent of the sea, of the shifting ground in the language. It really makes the poem interesting, and the opening is just great.

This is the opening:

I hush the peaches
the darkened kitchen
eerily clean in the
stainless gleam [...]


She has this great ability at immediate, beginning passages that are just incredible, way beyond usual stuff, which continues in her poem "Even a Zoo"--what a great combination in these two lines with the title. It actually reminds me when I was at the zoo in Washington, D.C. in autumn. It's great at sense of place and I love the clear emotion that's conveyed:

The dawn arrived and the plums fell.
We were both naïve and bold.


I even like her very late twentieth century in tone poem "Bubble Up"'s opening, despite not usually having many modern, punch-drunk, Tom Wolfe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test-esque feelings:

Blue drunk on applejacked burst
bulbs the buzzed of lower lawns mown