the pain diary by john compton and tommy sheffield
the pain diary by john compton and tommy sheffield
2026//limited edition 100 copies//4×5.5, 20 pgs.
Receive a free copy of the pain diary when you purchase Tommy Sheffield’s The White Room
Tommy Sheffield is a disabled, neurodivergent writer. His poems, stories, and essays have been published in ucity review, Adelaide, Sanitarium, Ghost City Review, Soul Forte Journal, cataloguing poetry magazine, Plague Circus Press, and others. As the Poetry Editor for Stillhouse Press he edited five critically acclaimed poetry books, and now helps oversee new projects. Including his work as a freelance editor, he has edited a total of eighteen published poetry collections. He holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University.
john compton (b. 1987) is a gay disabled poet. he lives in kentucky with his husband josh, alongside their dogs, cats, & mice. his latest books are: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); & house as a cemetery published with Rebel Satori Press (march 2026).
A visceral and cinematic meditation on bodily rupture, the pain diary charts the grotesque intimacy between pain, wounds and neglect. Each image blooms with surreal clarity. This is poetry that refuses silence and what it means to inhabit a wounded form.
—Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, author of The Naming
the pain diary is a vivid and convincing narrative of occupation. A disease or injury blurs the borders of what we expect of our body vs. what happens when it extrudes an invasion. In a very effective evocation of how a wound attacks and consumes us, compton and Sheffield tells the ultimate story of human vulnerability, a self overwhelmed to the point that the wound becomes its fate. This is a poem that has us in its clutches and won't let us go.
—Maxine Chernoff, author of Diary
To read this book is to stand before the mirror, watching the pain slithering from within your body—a cinematic admittance to loss. The strength of the pain diary lies not only in its admission of the body to loss but to question, as the book did: how far can injury be stretched? Herein is an invitation to the remnants of the body severed from its original self by the sharp edge of pain. Through this book, compton and Sheffield reminds us that after loss, what remains is language.
—Ridwan Fasasi, Editor, Writer, Poet.
In the pain diary, john compton and Tommy Sheffield turn a single, weeping wound into an astonishing field of vision where blood that “feels illegitimate,” a swelling “red balloon,” and a “small-scaled anatomy with tentacles” become the basis for a fierce meditation on how the body records harm, translates it into image, and struggles toward something like repair, even as gangrene lurks at the edges of the lesion. This book is genre-bending, a cartography, a distancing between the body and the body—the liminal and immediate—the unreachable and tangible memory. An astonishingly experimental lyric.
—Adedayo Agarau, Author of The Years of Blood