Reviewed by Peter Mladinic
The Side Effects Poems
by John Compton
Crying Heart Press
US$6.00, paper, 2026
What accounts for the allure of these poems is their totalities. Like all poems, each is more than the sum of its parts, yet they are unlike other poems. Their unlikeness allures, their originality. We think by feeling; we feel by thinking. A Compton poem’s fusion of thinking and feeling yields insight, and pleasure. Instructs and entertains. But how does it instruct? It unsettles, disturbs, shifts entities in its reader’s inner landscape. The poet invites us into their world, the world of the poem; we are immersed in its mystery, part of its mystery. A look at the explainable, parts of the whole—syntax, diction, and metaphor—enhances the reader’s pleasure in the mystery that constitutes each of these seventeen poems.
Syntax, integral to rhythm in all poems, is all the more conspicuous in poems that entice, hold back; poems in which silence is also integral to rhythm. The Side Effects Poems’ syntax is halting, measured, deliberate yet spontaneous. the thrust of the side effects is consistently vertical: the reader moves down rather than across the page. As with lines in poems with a horizontal thrust, some lines are end-stopped, others, enjambed. The sense of going down, sometimes tumbling, other times gliding through time, is bolstered by syntax: the order in which utterances are spoken. The dash in the middle of “side effects to deficiency” signals a turn; the voice in the first half, the voice the poet, is interrupted by the neurologist’s interjection: “nerves / in your nose / remembering something dead.” Then the poet comes back, to amplify the neurologist’s comment, with the conjunction, not the word “and” but the more visual ampersand “& the putrid scent / are their memories.” Consider how less striking the end would be if the last line began with “of” rather than “are.” Just as the word “nerves” functions to separate the living from the dead, the metaphor at the end disturbs, unsettles, pleases in its originality. Both speaker and reader in this “morgue poem” are alive enough to …smell memories. Only us: the speaker, the neurologist the speaker has gone to, and finally the reader. Compton makes us feel, and think. As a poet should do, he says more by saying less.
A neurologist in a “morgue poem” signals a deficiency. Perhaps the speaker feels sickened by these “putrid” memories. In a different context, a reader would encounter
a mortician. That Compton’s speaker and readers see a doctor is a matter of diction. In “side effects to eating” the reader’s eyes fall down to this negation: “prayers / were never processed.” That last word denotes the cerebral, thinking; commonly prayers are not “thought” but said, aloud or silently, as a matter of faith, belief. The poet follows one negation with another “no one set up,” and another, “I won’t,” and finally “—do not attach a poem.” Eating fills a stomach; ironically, this side effect consists of an emptying, a taking away of things (images) readers have briefly held on to, such as “the answering machine.” Poems are more about questions than answers. The word “processed” comes back as an infinitive: the speaker doesn’t just say
“how to process death but “i won’t figure out / how to process the death,” which is followed by white space and then “i requested.” The speaker’s own death, or someone else’s? Readers are held in suspense. Then the poem concludes with a polite vocative “please sign this nda” followed by a shift in tone, “—do not attach a poem.” What readers are asked to do, can’t help but do is to think by feeling all the way down the page, and Compton’s diction has made that experience an unsettling and pleasurable fall.
A third way this poet entices and engages is through metaphor. Compton’s metaphors are striking! Bones become flowers; dying is unbuilding a house; a physique is a stone coffin; a heart is a fist pounding on a door; clothes are a room; a body is a leaf in mid air; a reader is a beast; and a lover, a suit to wear, a person to inhabit. Taking these metaphors out of context does them an injustice, though, because in their respective poems they are no less than striking. A drug is a cracker is a communion wafer. “side effects to forgetting” concludes with this metaphor:
my body, a leaf,
& autumn is close
—grab it before it falls.
grab me
before i
fall.
“side effects to forgetting” begins with a metaphor. “Clothes” are a building a person
walks out of, to find themselves, not in another place, but in another state of being—naked, stripped down; stripped away of all inessential accessories. It’s a lean poem, hungry for touch, its speaker’s awareness of transience and mortality making readers all that more cognizant of life’s preciousness. It’s very much a pro-life poem.
As are all the poems in this collection. If art imitates life, these poems are indeed works of art, rendered in the voice of a person to whom originality is as natural as breathing. No one person could speak better for The Side Effects Poems than they speak for themselves. A gem titled “side effects to thinking” begins with the metaphor: thoughts are wild animals. The dark ones
come back to me
when I’m vulnerable:
some get as close
as my lover would.
they drag their fingers,
their nails tapering my emotions,
licking tears
off my eyes.
The Side Effects is a chapbook like no other. In “side effects to talking” the speaker’s “voice loses its balance.” But the poet never does. Time and again he goes to the edge but not over, in these visceral poems written by a poet with things to say, who says them very well.
About the reviewer: Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.