Last Day of My Face: James Shea in Conversation with Bianca Stone

“Shea stretches the possibilities of experience/interpretation to include not only the phantasmic and catastrophic, but the most mundane.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

Phoenix Books Burlington is proud to host Vermont poet James Shea to celebrate the release of his new book, Last Day of My Face. Shea will be in conversation with Vermont poet laureate Bianca Stone at Phoenix Books Burlington on July 16th, 2025. 

James Shea is the author of Last Day of My Face (University of Iowa Press, 2025), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize. His previous collections include The Lost Novel (Fence Books) and Star in the Eye, selected by Nick Flynn for the Fence Modern Poets Series. He is the translator of Applause for a Cloud (Black Ocean, 2025), a collection of contemporary Japanese poetry by Sayumi Kamakura. He co-edited The Routledge Global Haiku Reader (Routledge) and co- translated Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong (Zephyr Press). He directs the bilingual creative writing program at Hong Kong Baptist University and has received grants from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, National Endowment for the Arts, and Vermont Arts Council.

Bianca Stone is a Vermont-based poet and scholar currently serving as Vermont’s poet laureate. Stone is the author of over many books, including the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite which received the 2022 Vermont Book Award and The Near and Distant World, out from Tin House in January, 2026. Her poetry and writings have appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poets and Writers, The Nation and the Best American Poetry series. In 2013 she co-founded the poetry-based nonprofit, Ruth Stone House, where she organizes events and retreats, teaches classes on poetry and poetic study, hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast.

About the book

James Shea’s collection 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.”

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.