Literary Review

Review: 'Last Day of My Face' by James Shea

What takes shape in the hollow where words hesitate, and absence presses itself into being?

Neil Czeszejko

24 Mar 2025 — 2 min read

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.

An advance copy was provided by University of Iowa Press.