In her second collection, Shanna Compton leads readers on a lightly satirical tour through various works of advice for young women, including antique etiquette manuals, 19th-century sermons, pseudoscientific physiology textbooks, newspaper clippings, and the Internet.

Counseling girls on everything from fashion to family, the multiple personae in For Girls (& Others) clamour to convey their contradictory (and often ridiculous) wisdom, as their polyvocal cacophony pitches toward hysterical heights.

"This second collection shows more unity but less versatility than Compton's rightly praised, devil-may-care 2005 debut, Downspooky. 'For Girls,' the first of the two sequences that make up the book, responds to, reacts against and takes many phrases from an 1882 'health manual' with the same title: its advice on fashion, bodies and morals gives rise, in Compton's hands, to quirky but politically pointed verse: girls are told (too often, she implies) 'to erase the body,/ blank the self/ to receive the costumes it consumes.' The source text — and all the antifeminist counsels, all the social pressure, it represents — may give Compton too easy a target: her sequence recycles its own attitudes, with too few surprises for its length. 'Comedy of Manners,' the second sequence, may be harder to like at first, but should fare better over the long-term: its hints of romantic narrative, frequent sarcasm, riffs on found texts and ambitious range of diction (from elaborate to vulgar) all serve Compton's consistent interest in how and whether the culture will ever let girls grow up: 'Our official position is class piata.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The text of the poems in For Girls (& Others), culled from a variety of other sources, presents an unceasing attack on female humanity for the sake of perceived femininity ('never let them see you perspire'). The prevailing and unabashed objectification of women should not come as a surprise in a text that predates universal suffrage, however Compton makes her point inside the many surviving prejudices. When Britney Spears shearing her golden locks is followed with such intense public zeal, surely the unwritten gender rules continue to be heeded. Using this critique as her context, Compton delivers the unexpected other side of the coin, reaching beyond the politics on the surface and delivering delicately crafted and amusing poems." —ArtVoice

"So very many of Shanna Compton's poems are brilliant, perfectly crafted & even surprising, even as they occur within a formal palette we've lived with for four decades now. You can get famous writing this well, and Compton very likely will. Even more important, from my point of view, are the pieces that show her going beyond her initial frame of reference, [those which harken] back to Creeley's use of the quatrain & Zukofsky's sense of the hard-edged line in ways that I've seldom seen accomplished before." Ron Silliman