Praise for melancholy arcadia:

john compton’s melancholy arcadia reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters, those epistles to the you, to “my inverted god.” Each of compton’s poems lands like “a drop of water / like an atomic bomb,” and never relent in their examinations of love, violence, religion, poetry, and politics. They never cease “being bright / being brave.” The poems are “a celebration, filthy & beautiful/as peeling an orange,” and I found myself wanted to stay here, with the fists, the Adam’s apples, the maple tree, and words stringent as “tabasco, wasabi, / lemon.” Like Dickinson’s, compton’s lines are tight, “intricate / & sturdy.” He keeps the “fists / within the line.” The power of melancholy arcadia, this “open-handed slap,” will stay with me for a long time.

—Jennifer Martelli, All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes

john compton’s melancholy arcadia is a holding room for the micro-moments that characterize the deep shit of living. Both soft and profane, this brilliant book provides an examination into the barbs of desire, the vulnerable rebelliousness of queer longing, and a disobedience to the so-called architectures of artistic creation. compton challenges us in these pages toward reflection and embrace, toward simultaneous connection and a preservation of a defiant interiority. I’m most drawn to melancholy arcadia's rare and affectionate refusal—one that dances like “a ballet / intricate / & sturdy.”

—Jessica Q. Stark, author of Buffalo Girl + Poetry Editor, AGNI

john compton writes to destroy and to create, and his work lives in the tension of that inescapable truth: that what is is because what was is not. compton turns this skill of blowing up the world and standing in the debris into a metacognitive tour of poetry as a concept: a physical one, a social one, a spiritual one. In the context of melancholy arcadia, his biting critique of the economization of poetry (“i won’t go to that college to learn poetry / which i’ve taught myself”) becomes something more honest, more spiritual: “i’m without my garments / i take joy on myself.” compton describes typing as “my muscles choreograph[ing] a ballet." Like masturbation, like choreography, poetry serves as a messy joy. This messiness is a painful refrain, as compton compares his poems to destroyed and “mottled wings” that “are my soul”—later asserting, of the editing process, “no one will know what i heard.” Those words lost, sentiments rerouted, are a small act of the sort of destruction necessary in compton’s literary truth, and, in case the reader might have missed it, the narrator says bluntly and with the precision of a scalpel: “a poet knows / when their child should instead / be aborted.” This work is the child that lived, one born into a messy world equally capable of pain and joy. 

—Willie Carver, "Gay Poems for Red States"

john compton’s collection melancholy arcadia is a book of breath, of pause, of holding space in silences; it is a place where we “learn / the theory of fear.” And at the center of this book is the act of noticing; recollecting every small detail that pulls a memory from the toy box in our minds. compton takes stock of the littlest moment—the “singing howls” of “suspicious coyotes” and the “glassy snake eyes” of windows—because each note is another way we hold our loved ones close to us even after they are gone.

—jason b crawford, author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz