"From under the El in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to her window seat on the Harlem Line, Shmailo is right on track with poetry that dances with love, death and desire. The proverbial urban poet, Shmailo masterfully mixes the beauty and the gritty, in New York City."─Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press
“Reader beware: these are poems that lurk. Larissa evokes a stark, incisive view of the mad world where “graffiti burns my thighs / and I run through the clotheslines that flap on the roof” and you will not escape it by closing her extraordinary book. “I will slash my wrists,” she tells us, “and from my wrists will come ants and tired shopkeepers,” and we believe her. Writing doesn’t get much better than this.”─Jackie Sheeler, Talk Engine
“In these visceral wanderings into Larissa Shmailo's narratives, we venture through the teeming back alleys of Brooklyn on through the poet's labyrinthine youth until we reach the trepidatious poetic psyche of a woman who has lost in love but keeps on gambling with a strength to envy and behold. In Paran is not here to soothe─this is a book willing to discomfit and excite anyone who has grown too comfortable, inciting them to ‘forget the right answers/consult necromancers/allow the forbidden/ignore the guilt ridden/unlearn all the learning/embrace this new burning’”.─Amy King, I’m the Man Who Loves You
'Larissa Shmailo invites the reader to “imagine a use with me for all that doesn’t fit.” Her poems, alive with discomfort and broken pieces, teach an art of compassion without illusion. ─Robert Viscusi, winner, American Book Award,,Astoria
Sunday, May 10, 2009
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About Me
- Larissa Shmailo
Larissa Shmailo's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Penguin anthology Words for the Wedding, the Brooklyn Rail, The Unbearables Big Book of Sex, Barrow Street, Fulcrum, Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Cardinal Points, Lungfull, Big Bridge, Rattapallax, and About: Poetry. She was the winner of the 2009 New Century Music Awards for spoken word with music for her CD Exorcism; her first CD, The No-Net World, is heard frequently on radio and the Internet. Larissa's books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVox) and A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press). Read her new e-book, Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks) at http://www.lulu.com/product/
ebook/fib-sequence/16347718 (free download).Larissa translated the original English-language libretto of the Russian zaum opera Victory over the Sun performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; it is archived at the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Most recently, she received honorable mention in the international translators' competition for the 2011 Compass Award sponsored by Princeton University. Larissa translated a bibliography of Bible translations in the languages of the Russian Empire for the American Bible Society and contributed to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry published by Dalkey Archive Press.
Read Larissa Shmailo's new e-book, Fib Sequence, from Argotist Ebooks, FREE, at this link: http://www.lulu.com/product/
ebook/fib-sequence/16347718 Larissa blogs at http://larissashmailo.
blogspot.com And buy books and CDs and digital recordings here (so gratefully appreciated):
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias% 3Dstripbooks&field-keywords= shmailo&x=0&y=0
