I wasn't impressed. I had a hard time deciding between 1 and 2 stars. It was not bad in any sense, it was simply bland. I didn't get any flavor from the poems. It was hard to find anything worth reading in them. I was bored and it wasn't even a 100 page collection.
Safe to say I do not recommend.

This collection was a mixed bag for me, which surprised me as I often have high hopes and expectations for the University of Iowa Press. There were some pieces in this collection that were brilliant in their oddity of observance. These poems featured creative uses of language and surprising reflections. Everyday and at times, not typically considered, moments were mused on with a present feeling of loneliness. The first half of this collection did not stir much within me, though the writing became more mindful and engaging within the second half. At times, language felt scattered and more focused on musicality than meaning. The poems that didn't reach me did not provide anything new, surprising, or revelatory.

A collection of poetry by James Shea

James Shea illuminates the complexities and failures, and the beauty of witnessing the in-between in
Last Day of My Face (2025). I was settled into this collection and soothed by Shea’s command over observing the singular moment. And yet, he slices through with moments of witty pondering that allow the text to feel not stationary, but moved by his ability
to thread a rhythm not just over a poem but throughout the collection.

I found solace in Shea’s capturing of a deep and ancient, but what feel transient, wisdom in his words. As if such knowledge should be inside us, it waits to be unearthed but it lays dormant until it bubbles to surface, and still then the words may not be enough.

An ending that made us recall its very origins,

recombinant genes in the wayward leaves.

A crow can recognize a face and speak in dialect.

- James Shea (2025)

Shea moves seamlessly between the real and the surreal, revealing how fact and fiction work together to make sense of our world, ourselves, our ‘catastrophe’.

The collection is intimate and I felt like an observer in the corner of the half-dark room, watching the shadows move along the ground.

My mother held me as a baby.

I felt landlocked in her arms

- James Shea (2025)

Reading Last Day of My Face, I ponder how much is lost to our own observation, are we the only ones who notice the patterns of the world and its wounds like we do?

Is that lonely?

The arrangement of the poetry in Last Day of My Face is both understood for its importance but unable to be appreciated so wonderfully as the concluding poem by Shea once the reader has arrived to its page. It is clear that what we have been waiting
for is now here.

I hold no answers, only secrets

[…]

I re-dream the past into an area / where I have some authority

- James Shea (2025)

If I could read Last Day of My Face for the first time again, I would.

James Shea is a recipient for the Iowa Poetry Prize for 2025 Spring.

Last Day of My Face will be published 27 June 2025.

You can pre-order the book from
University of Iowa Press.

An ARC has been provided by University of Iowa Press

*this review will be posted on my writing blog 5 May 4:30pm AEST

If "Last Day of My Face" were a farewell card—which, given the romantic undertow of the speaker’s undoing, seems rather fitting—it would use die-cut negative space to propel itself into being. Here, inversion breeds contrast, which is just tension made pliable.

In Shea’s collection, we trip on the speaker’s existence only to grasp his absence as he finds ways of getting “outside [himself]—/ like a white van cradling its dent.” Landscapes of life both wild and man-made nurture by devouring his quiet erasure.

Likewise, sound emerges from the shortage of stillness, weight from the press of its dearth. Such soft skinning of consciousness unhinges the jaws of the muted mundane, now left screeching in silence.

Language lurches like a throbbing vein, coiling itself into acts of being (”I revise my wants”) only to unwind to reach the bedrock of another’s actuality. And so, words drift to replicate their playful ambiguity, lines splinter apart to welcome the white, and senses snap to make space for all that rests between one’s being and another’s end.

As bodies jump “at the first blush between [them],” we begin to make sense of the lips and the pause stretched along the seam, of the void of silence and the meaning poured to stave off its intimacy.

Relentlessly, the speaker is made real by all that pulls him back to his own perpetuity: the necklace that “drags attention” to his chest, the mouth that mutilates his meaning. The expected has never before unravelled so sweetly into spontaneity.

Shea’s collection invites us to consider the spaces between presence and absence, where language fails yet reveals itself most vividly, and where meaning is overcast by the world’s shaded interactions with the self. Ultimately, "Last Day of My Face" is an exquisite meditation on the profound tension of being, held taut—then severed—by the blade of a lover’s parting presence.

The poetry it’s self was great. I found the format of the ebook hard to read this may have just been a formatting issue that will be resolved but I found it very different and almost dnf’d for this reason. However the words on the page were beautiful