Our conversation with poet, writer, and translator James Shea, whose extraordinary new collection of poems Last Day of My Face (University of Iowa Press, 2025), was recently published as a winner of the prestigious Iowa Poetry Prize.
James Shea’s work delights in word play and unexpected images with a voice set at and considering the edges of meaning. As you’ll hear in our conversation, Shea draws from the traditions of haiku and The New York School, giving us humorous and elegiac meditations on our shared predicament as minds trying to make sense of emergency. Or, as Shea puts it at the start of the long poem, “Failed Self-Portrait,” which ends his new collection—and our conversation, “I’ve made a sort of makeshift / sense of ourselves…”
What makes this conversation especially meaningful is that our recording was also a reunion; my colleague, Adult Services Librarian Stevie Noguchi, and I each had James Shea as a poetry professor when he taught in Chicago over a decade ago. Stevie joins me as co-host for this special episode.
You’ll also hear Shea’s reflections on the art of translation, poetic lineage, and readings from the treasure trove of recent publications Shea has put out, as translator and editor, including:
Applause for a Cloud (Black Ocean, 2025), Shea’s translations of haiku by Japanese poet Sayumi Kamakura,
The Routledge Global Haiku Reader (Routledge, 2023), an introduction to current issues within haiku studies, which Shea co-edited with Grant Caldwell, and,
Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong (Zephyr Press, 2022), co-translated with novelist Dorothy Tse and introducing Hong Kong poet Yam Gong to English-language readers
James Shea is associate professor and director of the creative and professional writing program at Hong Kong Baptist University. His previous poetry collections The Lost Novel (2014) and Star in the Eye (2008) were both published by Fence Books.
You can check out titles by James Shea here at the Library as part of our Podcast Collection, featuring books and other materials by past guests of the show.