“These poems are alive, real, and will make you feel like you’re not crazy. ”—ALEX DIMITROV, author of Love and Other Poems“[Compson] writes the only kind of poetry worth reading—devastatingly told with a broken heart and muddled brain in soulless suburbia.

People Scare Me is a disquieting portrait of the inevitable in the everyday: romantic obsession, pharmaceutical relief, and the ephemera in our lives that both trap us and help us transcend it all. [He] gives us fleeting glimpses of the glorious and profane, reminding us of what it is to be human—stupidly open to everything to a heartbreaking degree.

”—JILLIAN LUFT, contributing editor of Vlad Mag“People Scare Me is a snow globe at rest on a Taco Bell wrapper. But the snow is crushed Ambien, the trees are the woods you smoked pot in back home, and the figurines are all bruised with blue jeans, wearing tacky makeup.

There’s no money here, but there’s love. Beatnik in the best way and contemporary as K2, Cash Compson’s collection will leave you gutted but hopeful—it will make you go outside.

”—SHY WATSON, author of Horror Vacui“I kind of wish this collection was only the poem Cash so brilliantly titled ‘I Will Not Use Your Name for Clout’ because it is abt watching a young Tik-Tok female influencer eat a patty melt while attempting to contact one’s ex & it is, as the title suggests, brilliant and relatable in a way few poems or writing are, but then there are the other poems before and after it abt such things as Jonathan Franzen and Taco Bell and they are nice too so why not keep them around also?”—ELIZABETH ELLEN, author of Person/a and editor of Hobart“These poems are like hand grenades filled with salve. They wound you then pull you in for a hug.

They whisper ‘I love you’ right after plunging the knife in. Then the miracle gauze.

”—TROY JAMES WEAVER, author of Temporal“In People Scare Me, we binge and idle and fall in love in New England during the hot hell of its summers, the inevitable dirty freeze, and Cash has the aux cord and we may or may not die. Compson perfectly captures the ache of this seasonal flux: self-obliteration threaded with hope.

Every time we’re about to crash, time slows and we reverse, and he shows us something beautiful. ”—EMILY COSTA, author of Until It Feels Right“Cash is the cruelest kind of god—he shows us the end of the world and dares us to hope.

”—CATHERINE SPINO, Vlad Mag and Black Lipstick contributor“A debut collection so dripping with beautiful American malaise that it resembles a blacklight poster depicting a broken-down monster truck drenched in mud and glorious human wreckage. ”—BRIAN ALAN ELLIS, founder of Vlad Mag and author of Hobbies You Enjoy.