Thursday, December 31, 2015

Come out of the darkness about depression this holiday


Over

On the perfect roof, near a perfect ledge,
A small terra firma with a narrow edge,
No temporizing with last-minute balance,
No handhold, no foothold, no anchor, no ballast.
And once committed, once into the air,
No hovering, no kiting, no waiting there.
The polygonal street and the shining dark cars
Attacked at meters per second squared.
Once over, soon over: a thing done just once:
Like fireworks and New Years’ bells, fast and intense,
Quite finite, soon finished, thought long, slow begun,
And forgotten by others like the old year now done.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Thanks for a great literary 2015!

What a fantastic year 2015 has been! I want to thank everyone who helped me perform and publish and learn my craft this year. First, thank you Geoffrey Gatza and BlazeVOX [books] for publishing my novel, Patient Women, and to Meredith Sue Willis and Kimberly Rae Lorenz-Copeland for their thoughtful, insightful reviews, and to all my peeps in the Patient Women Facebook group for your enthusiastic readership.
I presented at two panels at AWP 2015, with poetry from the Eastern European Daughters of Baba Yaga and, moving in very erudite company indeed, on a translation panel with Matvei Yankelevich, Phil Metres, and Alexander Cigale. Speaking of translation, my rendering of Victory over the
Sun was performed in a high tech staging at Boston University under the auspices of director Anna Winestein and the Ballets Russes Initiative. It was also performed in part here in New York at the Cornelia Street Cafe with a brilliant performance by Bowery Bob Holman as the Time Traveler.
And then, to blow the roof off, there was the Unlikely Saints Poetry Tour of South Louisiana! OMG, New Orleans, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, I love you! Thanks to impressario Jonathan Penton and friends for life Alexandra Johnson and Wendy Taylor Carlisle.
I got my own Wikipedia page thjs year! I was proud to have work in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and to be interviewed on Pennsound and to have my critical article on Philip Nikolayev's immured sonnets, an invented form, translated into Italian for the international translation journal Grafias. And, thanks to Jonathan Penton again, I got a brand new website: www.larissashmailo.com
Best of all, I studied meter and poetry with Annie Ridley Crane Finch -if only all teachers were like this guiding, inspiring woman! So proud to be presenting with Annie, Timothy Steele, Dean Kostos, and Amanda Johnson at AWP 16 next year.
Friends, thank you for making this possible. I kiss you all and wish you a very happy New Year indeed.

Friday, December 18, 2015

Christmas Star by Joseph Brodsky

Christmas Star
by Joseph Brodsky
Tr. L. Shmailo
 
In a cold time, in a place accustomed more
To scorching heat, than cold, to the flatness of plain,
than to hills: A child was born in a cave to save the world.
And it stormed, as only the winter’s desert storms rain.
 
Everything seemed huge to him: his mother’s breast,
The yellow steam of the camels’ breath. And from afar,
Their gifts carried here, the Magi, Balthazar, Melchior, Caspar.
He was all of him just a dot. And that dot was a star.
 
Attentively and fixedly, through the sparse clouds
Upon the recumbent child in the manger, through the night’s haze
From the depths of the universe, from its end and bound,
A star watched over the cave. And that was the Father’s gaze.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Reading for Seattle AWP 2014 for Madhat and Fulcrum

Reading of my poems "In Paran," "Bloom," "Father of a Ghost (after Stephen Dedalus's Theory of Hamlet), and "Letter to Lermontov." Video by Jonathan Penton
Madhat/Fulcrum Seattle 2014 AWP reading

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Free track DEATH AT SEA from THE NO-NET WORLD CD

"Death at Sea" and other tracks from my CDs THE NO-NET WORLD and EXORCISM are now available FREE on YouTube. Tracks are also available from Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Deezer, Muze, and most digital distribution outlets. Enjoy!

Death at Sea (2:20)
Provided to YouTube by CDBaby Death at Sea (2:20) · Larissa Shmailo The No-Net World ℗ 2006 Larissa Shmailo Released on: 2006-01-01
 

Recording of my poem with footnotes, "Phylum"

A recording of my poem, "Phylum," for Indiefeed Performance Poetry and the Performance Poetry Preservation Project led by Wess Mongo Jolley.

Phylum

Saturday, December 05, 2015

A vid of my New Orleans reading on the Unlikely Saints tour

Reading in my red New Orleans hat!

New review of PATIENT WOMEN, a novel by Larissa Shmailo

Thanks to Kimberly Ray Copeland for her review of PATIENT WOMEN, to appear in the Midwest Book Review this month.
Poet/novelist Larissa Shmailo's latest offering, Patient Women, is a raw, unfaltering, fictional story (heavily peppered, no doubt, with the author’s own personal anecdotes) that follows the tumultuous life of one highly likeable Nora Nader - a self-deprecating heroine with an indelible edge.
Nora, the daughter of an overbearing mother and an emotionally detached father; both Nazi prison camp survivors, is determined to assert herself and make her way through the world according to her own rules and regulations. Her whirlwind journey begins in 1970's Queens, NY, where Nora, at the tender age of 12, leaves home and takes to the inhospitable streets of NYC.
While battling a plethora of personal demons, including; sex, drug, and alcohol addiction, as well as severe depression (“I’m never happy. I always feel like Auschwitz inside”), we watch in horror as our protagonist devolves from Ivy League student, to waitress, to prostitute (“The best blow job in NY”).
Both physical and emotional abuse is prevalent throughout the course of Nora’s life, and slowly but surely long-buried secrets are unearthed.
With unrelenting determination, and a little help from her friends (specifically, a drop dead gorgeous drag queen turned AA sponsor named Chrisis, who assures Nora, in regards to sobriety/recovery, “If I can do this, anybody can.”) Nora finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.
At moments painstakingly heart-wrenching, at others, hopefully poetic, Patient Women is ultimately an in-your-face tale about the resilience of the human spirit, in the midst of familial and societal discord, and the ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Scribd Preview of PATIENT WOMEN

Dear friends, here's a preview of my new novel, Patient Women, a story of a woman's journey through sex addiction, substance abuse, the Woodstock and punk rock crazy years, to recovery and love and a life as an artist (my story).
Read PATIENT WOMEN preview

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Southern Love

We just finished the fourth leg of our Unlikely Saints tour of Southern Louisiana, with shows in New Orleans, Baton Rouge. Lafayette, and Grand Coteau. What an experience! The poetry, the music, the dancing, the food, and most of all, the people! Thanks to Jonathan Penton for organizing this mindblowing word trip! I'll be back for more crawfish, zydeco dancing, and southern love soon!

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Vote for PATIENT WOMEN in the Goodreads 2015 Choice Awards

Friends, please vote for PATIENT WOMEN in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2015 for best fiction! My poet protagonist Nora and I really appreciate your vote  Cast your vote in the FICTION category.
Please vote for PATIENT WOMEN here!
THANKS!
Vote for the best books of the year! Check out the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award nominees in 20 categories!
2015 Goodreads Choice Awards: Best Fiction.
 
 

Thursday, November 05, 2015

One day remaining in the PATIENT WOMEN Goodreads Giveaway!

Dear friends:
There is one day remaining in the Patient Women Goodreads Giveaway.
Please enter to receive a free signed copy! 
Click here for details: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160212-patient-women


Sunday, November 01, 2015

Six days remaining in the PATIENT WOMEN Goodreads Giveaway

Dear friends:
There are six days remaining in the Patient Women Goodreads Giveaway.
Please enter to receive a free signed copy! 
Click here for details: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160212-patient-women


Thursday, October 29, 2015

Enter the PATIENT WOMEN Goodreads Giveaway!

Dear friends:
Enter the PATIENT WOMEN Goodreads Giveaway for a chance to win a FREE signed copy of my new novel. PATIENT WOMEN has been called "a brutally honest wrestling match of truth-telling and sex" and "the best book . . . about this period of life in NYC since Patti Smith's Just Kids."  Hailed as stylistically brilliant (thank you, readers!) in its use of poetry, journal entries, flash, and innovative narrative, PATIENT WOMEN has chapters about prostitution, the Holocaust, incest, and the post-Woodstock era.
Enter here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160212-patient-women

        Patient Women by Larissa Shmailo
   


   

     


      Buy a copy: Patient Women
     


      THANK YOU!


          by Larissa Shmailo
     



     

         
            Giveaway ends November 06, 2015.
         

         
            See the giveaway details
            at Goodreads.
         

     

   

   



    Enter Giveaway

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

My poem, "Gaia's Lunacy," appears in Journal of Poetics Research

I am very pleased that my poem, "Gaia's Lunacy," appears in John Tranter's new Journal of Poetics Research. 

Here is the text of the poem:

GAIA’S LUNACY

The Sun is hot and bothered, and libidinal, having fathered
all our mendicants and tycoons, cops and robbers, and our rife loons.

The Earth below is verdant, child of Eros, green, exultant
for solar love would bask her with his sure heat and not task her,

but treasure all her madmen, all her masters and their bondsmen,
thus offering a devotion of which our Gaia has no notion.

The fickle Earth presumes a love from solar powers as enough;
Her denizens expect the same and bask in glory with no name.

Now, the music of the spheres should play loud in one's own ears
But creation's power's assumed, and unheard by all us loons.

Journal of Poetics Research:
http://poeticsresearch.com/article/larissa-shmailo-poem-gaias-lunacy/

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Countdown to Louisiana!

Dear Louisiana friends, I am so excited to be visiting the legendary cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette for the very first time. I'll be reading from my books In Paran, #specialcharacters, and my new novel, Patient Women. I hope to see you at my readings there!
 
Tuesday, November 3, 7pm-9pm
Elevator Projects
451 Florida St., Suite 102, Baton Rouge
(in the downtown Chase building)
No cover, wine provided
Readers include Xander Bilyk (New Orleans), Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)

Thursday, November 5, 6pm sharp-8pm sharp:
Crescent City Books
230 Chartres St., New Orleans
No cover, wine provided
Readers include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Carolyn Hembree (New Orleans), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Christopher Shipman (New Orleans), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)

Friday, November 6, 7:30 pm-9:30pm
The Ballet Académie
200 Polk St., Lafayette
No cover, wine provided
Readers include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), Larissa Shmailo (NYC), and John Warner Smith (Baton Rouge)

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

My essay, The Combinatorics of Context, is now in Italian

My essay on Philip Nikolayev's embedded sonnets,  The Combinatorics of Context, appears in Italian in the international journal Grafias, This essay originally appeared in The Battersea Review edited by Ben Mazer.

http://www.grafias.it/i-sonetti-integrati-di-philip-nikolayev-la-combinatoria-del-contesto/

Thursday, October 01, 2015

Readings in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette in November



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“UNLIKELY SAINTS”
Literary events in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette
Supporting the Festival of Words, Lyrically Inclined, and Unlikely Books

                                                CONTACT:    Jonathan Penton
                                                                        (337) 207-8713
                                                                        jonathan@unlikelystories.org

 In the first week of November, 2015, south Louisiana publisher Unlikely Books will join with Lafayette’s premiere open-mic-and-slam series, Lyrically Inclined, and the Festival of Words in Grand Coteau in a celebration of the literature produced by and available to south Louisiana readers. Six writers from south Louisiana will join Larissa Shmailo of New York City, Michael Harold of Shreveport, and Wendy Taylor Carlisle of Eureka Springs, AR in a series of three literary events featuring diverse backgrounds, styles, and literary themes.
The events are called the “Unlikely Saints” tour, mimicking a similar tour in November 2011. Flyers and publicity photo attached.

Tuesday, November 3, 7pm-9pm
Elevator Projects
451 Florida St., Suite 102, Baton Rouge
(in the downtown Chase building)
No cover, wine provided
Readers include Xander Bilyk (New Orleans), Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)

Thursday, November 5, 6pm sharp-8pm sharp:
Crescent City Books
230 Chartres St., New Orleans
No cover, wine provided
Readers include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Carolyn Hembree (New Orleans), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Christopher Shipman (New Orleans), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)

Friday, November 6, 7:30 pm-9:30pm
The Ballet Académie
200 Polk St., Lafayette
No cover, wine provided
Readers include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), Larissa Shmailo (NYC), and John Warner Smith (Baton Rouge)

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

I am reading at Sidewalk for One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change Saturday, 9/26

The fifth annual One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change, New York City edition, will be held at the Sidewalk Cafe on Saturday, Sept. 26th. This event was curated by Valery Oisteanu, and will be MC'd by Ron Kolm,

Readers include Claudia Serea, Tom Walker, Allan Graubard, Kat Georges, Peter Carlaftes, Ronnie Norpel, Bill Wolak, Larissa Shmailo, David St-Lascaux, Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky, Shelley Miller, Carl Watson, Wanda Phipps, Jeff Wright, Ilka Scobie and Kelvin Daly.

All thanks to Michael Rothenberg for creating this wonderful world-wide event for peace!


Sidewalk Cafe
94 Avenue A, New York, NY 10009
6:00 pm
(212) 473-7373

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Books for Readers review of Patient Women (full text)

Probably the biggest surprise of my summer reading was Patient Women by Larissa Shmailo. Shmailo is a highly accomplished poet, editor, and translator (see my review of her poetry in Issue # 169) . She does a lot of so-called "mixed" media, and she blogs at larissashmailo.blogspot.com. She is productive and successful, and lives a rich life in the arts.
She is also a survivor and child of survivors, and in her new novel Patient Women, she fictionalizes pieces of her life and recreates passages from her parents' lives as well as creating searing poems ostensibly written by her character Nora Nader.
There is plenty of recreational sex and drugs and drinking and also sex work, and brilliant recreations of the downtown milieu of New York City in the nineteen seventies. Much, much sensation and despair and struggle. There are whorehouse discussions during down time about what you want in an ideal client, and there are stunning shocks: at one point, Nora finally finds a man who has potential as a long term partner. They marry-- and he drowns on their honeymoon.
Nora's life is out of control, but the novel is completely in the novelist's control. In her great confidence in her own powers, Shmailo moves towards the end out of the straight narrative into a series of experiments in story telling and genre.
The bulk of the book is the grim narrative of Nora's dive into the lower depths and her grumbling return to sobriety through the efforts of a saintly trans friend who is dying of AIDS. Then, Nora begins to press her mother to repeat and explain family stories of their time in concentration camps under the Nazis: how they survived intact. She includes her mother's stories as free-standing short works, and it becomes increasingly clear that the family was not intact at all. The stories throw Nora into a near psychotic state of remembering that seems like too much for one person to bear. She says goodbye to Chrisis, her dying sobriety sponsor. She gives support to a dying stranger, money to a beggar. She notices that the world is still around her. And then come the poems, which act both as a reprise of the themes and events of the novel and also also as unnarrated evidence of Nora's talent and hopeful future. It is a gamble, to end a novel with so many passages in a different genre, but it pays off beautifully: Nora doesn't forget, perhaps doesn't even move on completely, but she can be with people. She can create.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Great review of my new novel, Patient Women, in Books for Readers

I'm deeply grateful to Meredith Sue Willis for her review of Patient Women (read below). She has fully understood my protagonist's (and my own) salvation: we can create; we can be with people.

Books for Readers review of Patient Women

Tuesday, September 01, 2015

Connotation Press Interview

I'm delighted to be interviewed by the wonderful MegTuite in the current issue of Connotation Press,with excerpts from my new novel, Patient Women, and a PTSD poem.
Connotation Press interview with Larissa Shmailo

Great review of Patient Women by Meg Tuite!

Dive into the deep end: read this novel! Unforgettable and mesmerizing!
By M. Tuite on August 27, 2015
There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. "Patient Women" is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by "Patient Women". WOW!!! Unforgettable!

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Russian Launch Party for Larissa Shmailo’s Patient Women (press release)



For immediate release
Press contacts:
Larissa Shmailo
212-712-9865
Regina Khidekel

Russian Launch Party for Larissa Shmailo’s Patient Women
Uncle Vanya’s
315 West 54th Street
New York, NY
212-757-0168
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
7:00 to 10 pm
FREE; open to the public
New York City. A real Russian launch party will celebrate the publication of poet Larissa Shmailo’s debut novel, Patient Women, on September 8. Sponsored by the Russian American Culture Center, the event features the talents of a glittering host of prominent Eastern European and New York City literary figures, including Alex Cigale, Steve Dalachinsky, Bonny Finberg, Andrey Gritsman, Patricia Spears Jones, Ron Kolm, Irina Mashinski, Yuko Otomo, Audrey Roth, and Thad Rutkowski.
About Patient Women
Patient Women has been called “a brutally honest wrestling match of truth-telling and sex” and “the best book . . . about this period of life in NYC since Patti Smith's Just Kids.” Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire, writes:
Larissa Shmailo’s Patient Women tells the story of Nora, a gifted young woman who comes of age in New York against heavy odds. Her Russian mother is demanding; the young men around her are uncaring; and her dependence on drink and sex leads her to a shadowy life filled with self-made demons. Yet Nora’s intelligence pulls her through the difficult times—there are even moments of (very) dark humor here.
Anne Elliott, author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, adds:
Christ-figures are likely to be cross-dressers in this engaging bildungsroman, which takes us on a wild ride through NYC nightclubs of the 1970's, rock-bottom blackouts, a whorehouse, and the slogan-filled rooms of recovery. Surreal and lyrical, then bawdy and riotous, then plainspoken and tragic, Patient Women had me rooting hard for its lovable, drowning heroine to keep her head above water and let in grace.
The Russian American Cultural Center
The Russian American Cultural Center (RACC) sponsors readings, art exhibitions, film screenings, and other events of interest throughout New York; for more information about RACC, see their website at http://www.russianamericanculture.com/
The launch party for Patient Women is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing by the author at the event. Patient Women is also available on Amazon at

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