Deep Whoosh

Author: Shanna Compton

Publisher: Black Square Editions (2025)

Deep Whoosh collects fifty handmade cut-and-paste collages by poet, printmaker, and book designer Shanna Compton into a vibrant, layered, and often-witty artist’s book, complete with an essay on their making and two related poems.

Created over a period of four months in a daily practice, the collages began with a list of closed-caption sound effects (gathered from movies) that serve as their titles. Constructed from piles of found imagery clipped from myriad print sources, the artworks also incorporate her own hand-printed papers, pieces cut from her original drawings and linocuts, manual typescripts, and additional mixed-media detailing. As Compton explores the new meanings that arise when incongruous “bits and pieces” are joined, she ranges through themes including climate change, public demonstrations and political movements, unchecked American gun violence, her upbringing in Texas, the COVID-19 pandemic, and various personal topics, including her experience of progressive hearing loss. “I didn’t plan the series as a book,” she writes in the essay, “but perhaps it was inevitable that they ended up feeling like one. As I lay out the pages for Deep Whoosh five years later, I am surprised and delighted to discover certain pairings that feel intentional—the way the blue-footed boobies dance goofily in near-extinction across from the hooded death-poppy figures, the way the archer woman laughingly points her arrow at the faceless (yet iconically recognizable) JFK. But the order is simply chronological.”