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john compton's New Poetry Collection Navigates Love, Longing, and the Fragile Spaces Between

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Published
08/21/2025 by

In his bold and unflinchingly intimate new collection, john compton invites readers into a world both surreal and starkly real in my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store. With a title as evocative as the poems within, compton's latest work maps the vulnerable contours of queer love, mental health, memory, and the sacred architecture of the body.

Described as "a roadmap for the poet's poetic and personal life" by Mark Danowsky (EIC of One Art), the book plunges into the dichotomy of presence and absence, desire and despair—often within the same breath. The poems are raw with confession, meditative in form, and imbued with a lyricism that is both ethereal and grounded.

Award-winning poet Angelique Zobitz calls the collection "a captivating exploration of life's delicate balance between darkness and light," while Daniel Lee praises compton's ability to use "ordinary things" to deliver emotional clarity and devastation. In compton's hands, the mundane becomes mythic: sweat beads, brand-name underwear, a cave, a bruised cheek, and a tattoo that says miss you sleeping—all rise into the realm of the symbolic.

With lines that shimmer with grief and bloom with beauty, the collection oscillates between painful tenderness and brutal clarity. Poems like "i pretended that he liked me" and "i mowed your facial hair," cut to the bone with their honesty, while "as i become a man" renders the transformation of self through the metaphor of a womb-like cave, illustrating compton's thematic exploration of identity, gender, and rebirth.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon, author of Transitory, lauds the book as "a clear-eyed examination of the body, its hungers, desires, shames, and pains," while Kai Coggin highlights its "arresting display of surprising lyricism and visual music... a surrealist tone that evokes another world of escape."

This is poetry that refuses to look away. my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store doesn't just ask for your attention—it commands it.

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