Last Day of My Face

"Description: In this beguiling third collection, James Shea deepens his exploration of the elegiac imagination, sending estranged speakers into new fields of quiet crisis. Orbiting a vast absence, Last Day of My Face reveals a kaleidoscopic perspective on impermanence: "Tomorrow / is a partial and promised gift." Shea's poems often look outward-at extras in a film, a white stoat, a streetlight-as modes of connection to navigate loss. Rich with reversals, short poems are wedged against skittery contemplations, and an easeful tone coexists with a vein of darkness. Akin to lucid dreaming, this startling volume builds toward a final poem that gathers fragments of selves into a wondrous whole"--