PRAISE FOR THE CASTRATION OF A MINOR GOD

In the castration of a minor god, john compton cracks open a deep, raw, inner dialogue, one that demands discourse with the world’s “pyramid scheme of love,” even if standing “in front of closed doors,” even if that demand to be heard feels like “ingesting wings from birds / hoping to learn flight.” What does it mean to be a gay man, inhabiting a body, in a “claustrophobic landscape of ghost shapes?” What does it mean to be human, inevitably faced with disappointments, prejudices, violence, desire? These poems are truths alight, brave in their endurance and unflinching in their questions, unafraid to burn brightly as we watch. 

— Joan Kwon Glass, author of NIGHT SWIM

john compton has the expert view of heterosexual violence with poems you will not forget in their economy of beauty! Poems that refuse to live by harsh penalties of religious tyrants, there is an abundance of queer joy ringing throughout these fast-turning pages! Whatever troubles you woke with today, this book is a lantern through our new dark age.

— CAConrad, author of Amanda Paradise

The poems in john compton’s castration of a minor god are dreamy and bedeviled and profane, the verse reading like some cross between spell-casting and texts lifted from the verdicts of witch trials. However, this time it’s the witch speaking her indictment, though not really a witch; instead, the speaker is just a man who dares to love other men, and who dares to throw the language of holiness back into the faces of those who would condemn him. The result is heresy and incineration and desire. The brilliant result, tempered by the restraint of craft, burns like outrage kept under control by compton’s careful poetics. 

— Sonia Greenfield, author of All Possible Histories

the castration of a minor god is a wild & unapologetic journey. Its pages unreel into images of stark beauty & uncompromising ferocity. They bustle with necessary rage & rebel against the institutions that condemn men for loving men. john compton’s voice is astounding.

— Aldo Amparán, author of Brother Sleep

the castration of a minor god is full of spare yet unsparing poems—I’m reminded of C.P. Cavafy’s concise passions and Randall Mann’s sharp carnalities. Such hunger lives in this collection, bodily hungers as well as spiritual. Family is a site of grief and unspoken loves, unspeakable pains. The throat is a site of pleasure and wound, sometimes simultaneously. Speech is an erotic act, and sex—unmistakably gay sex—is a relief, a joy, and a deep complication of its own. Here is a poet committed to bold language and true emotion, however unsettling. Here are poems willing to look at both violence and beauty, purposefully unsure which is the looking that burns the most.

— Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency