(I’ll wear his boxers like razors across my ass. Take these — the time we entered the room said aloud to anyone who would listen, “Happiness!” I wasn’t happy. Take the first three times we made love my heart breaking for the people I’d wronged to be with you. Take the regret and you on the toilet with your elbows on your knees saying, “I can’t do this anymore.” Take him — the poor bastard losing his self-respect for you. Take him to the edge of sanity say, “Happiness!” ) Shark Life: prose poems moves with the quiet menace and grace of lived experience. These pieces breathe in close quarters where fear, tenderness, and resolve share the same room. From domestic terror to historical echo, from working lives to private reckonings, the writing understands how a single choice can bruise the spirit or save it. Compton’s sentences know when to bare teeth and when to listen. They speak in a love language forged from restraint, attention, and risk. Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lives in Pike County, Kentucky. Shark Life is his second book with Alien Buddha Press after Runaways (2021), and it confirms a voice that refuses to look away.