Book Review: ‘Last Day of My Face,’ James Shea

James Shea’s new poetry collection, Last Day of My Face, progresses as if it were two books. The second begins two-thirds of the way through, where the poems’ shape, style, rhythm and mode of narration change in every respect.

For the first 43 pages, the apparently characteristic Shea composition is succinct and quite solitary in vantage point, with hardly another person to be found among scenes and settings mostly vacant. Here is “Enskied” in its entirety:

Shea’s shorter poems are halting, as though wary of being plainspoken. Many of them end abruptly, whittled down to a riddle. This is clearly, and carefully, deliberate: Shea writes about our common experience of bafflement in ways that may themselves be baffling, as in “This Time of Hour,” about a specific prairie landscape in the northwest U.S.:

In dramatic contrast, the book’s far lengthier final poem, “Failed Self-Portrait,” runs more than 14 pages, with stretched-out, more syntactically complex lines and a warm, forthcoming manner:

Shea is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Lost Novel (2014) and Star in the Eye (2008), and his primary residence is in Montpelier. He wrote many of the poems in Last Day of My Face in Vermont during an extended sabbatical, with support from a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant in 2020.

Shea directs the bilingual Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he continues to teach half the year. In 2025, he became poet-in-residence at the Neafsey Lab in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Shea is also a translator of contemporary Japanese and Chinese poetry, and he coedited an international anthology, The Routledge Global Haiku Reader. A number of the shorter poems in Last Day of My Face have the concision often noted in Asian poems, with their quick glides between statement and image, willfully enigmatic.

“Extraordinary Means” concludes with what seems to be a description of stalls at a farmers’ market that elides toward an allusion to “aches” that may be the farmer’s or might be the poet’s (we can’t tell):

This passage is an example of Shea’s frequent use of run-on phrasing in the shorter poems, which a grammarian would call comma splices — independent clauses separated by commas rather than semicolons. The technique makes many of the pieces in the first part of the book sound like notations of a wandering mind.

In “Two-Body Problem” the poet uses commas to achieve a jaunty, songlike lilt:

Could this be true, that toes are alive longer than the rest of a dead body? Perhaps Shea learned this in his time among the scientists at the Neafsey Lab.

“Failed Self-Portrait,” the longer, concluding poem, has nine sections, each of which might be a poem in its own right. In combination they offer a breadth and continuity not found in the first part of the book. On this larger canvas, Shea foregrounds more generous description of the outside world, beyond what he calls “a kind of homelessness / of the mind” (a phrase that is aptly evocative of his bleaker, shorter poems). Maybe the “failure” referred to in the poem’s title is that his writing here escapes the constraints of self-enclosed expression, thereby failing to be only a portrait of the artist.

“Failed Self-Portrait” also brings in relationships with other people, which complicate a life in substantial, meaningful ways. In Section 4, the poet locates his new book’s most overtly tender aspiration, which serves, too, as an artistic credo: “Oh, / to // write / a // moderately / long // sentence / that // begins / in // my / mind // and / ends // in / yours.”

An individual poem might take a minute to read, brief as a comic strip, and a volume of poems may be a fraction of the length of a typical novel. Yet to explore Shea’s work perceptively, piece by piece and through the book as a whole, requires time and concentration. This poet offers insights and pleasures, but they are not easily gained. From its premonitory, elegiac title through its contrasting styles and parts, Last Day of My Face resists the kind of skimming that often passes now for reading.

This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.

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