Monday, December 31, 2018

Gratitude List

1. For my life as a writer, for the apparent insanity of writing poems
2. For my friends and colleagues
3. For health despite all I have done to impair it
4. For the ability to make needful changes
5. For three days clean from food addiction - thank you for your support!
6. For recovery from drugs, alcohol, nicotine, sex addiction, and codependence
7. For my life - for turning self-destruction into purpose. I never thought I would make 30 (neither did anyone else) and here I am, 62.
8. For the memory of those better than me that are gone
9. For my books, the children I leave behind
10. For you!
Happy New Year!

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Goodbye Old, Welcome New

Another year, a good one except for Trump, and even he is now on the run; I say goodbye to 2018 with fondness. Creatively, the muse has been kind to me.
We said goodbye to the Cornelia Street Café with a bang with a Democratic poetry fundraiser before the midterms. "All-Star Women Poets Read" with Elaine EquiRachel HadasPatricia Spears JonesTrace Peterson, myself, and emcee Maggie Balistreri raised awareness and a big chunk of money as part of the global 100 Thousand Poets for Change initiative organized by Michael Rothenberg.
At AWP Tampa, I presented on the poetry of Claudia Rankine and Patricia Smith with illustrious co-panelists Marc VincenzElizabeth L. Hodges, and Michael Anania. I also did two readings with Dean Kostos in the New York Public Library system for our MadHat poetry books, mine, Medusa’s Country, and Dean’s, Pierced with Night-Colored Threads.
They say that if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. I was definitely in the right room at the brilliant Association of Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies 50th Anniversary conference, where I presented on the experimental poetry of Alexander Skidan. Co-panelists on the contemporary Russian poetry panel were Evgeny PavlovEugene Ostashevsky, and chair Vladimir Feshchenko.
In 2018, I had pubs or acceptances in the St. Petersburg Review, the Journal of Poetics Research, Unlikely Stories, The New Verse News, Shrew, Intersections: Poetry with Mathematics, A Gathering of the Tribes, North of Oxford, the bilingual English-Bengali journal Shadowkraft, The Lit Pub, EcoPoetry, and Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, where I became a contributing editor. I also was included in the Italian compendium The Sound Poetry Library and the anthologies Bosch and Bruegel Poems and Choices: Poems about Abortion (editor Annie Finch). And the Poetry School based a course on the online anthology I edited, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry (free at http://bigbridge.org/…/twenty-first-century-russian-poetry-…).
Extremely exciting is the publication of my new, very weird novel, Sly Bang, available now from Amazon and Spuyten Duyvil– launch date is March 6, 2019 at the Jefferson Market Library, so please save the date. I also look forward to AWP Portland 2019, where I will be on two panels, The Crtitical Creative and Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position? (with Erica Jong!!!) and to reading at the New Orleans Poetry Festival in April- thanks to Jonathan Penton for inviting me.
Wishing you blessings of health, creativity, and love in 2019!
Love,
Larissa

Monday, December 24, 2018

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.

Thursday, December 20, 2018

My Poem, "CLASS WAR," Up at THE NEW VERSE NEWS


READ "Class War" at THE NEW VERSE NEWS

CLASS WAR
Your father’s fingers never got caught in a machine press.
You never saw the indigo marks on his nails as he never 
lifted a finger against you, but I knew what my library books 
cost.
 The world was yours, and if I objected on behalf of a man 
who worked overtime too many times, I was attacked as 
a Marxist, which I am —the indigo marks and the midnight 
shifts
 of a family that worked till they dropped, Mama, Papa, Baba,
Ded—taught me how to read. They never lifted a tired worn
finger against you – their labor was, you so often told them,
sipping
tea picked by tired black fingers in inherited cups, was their
Horatio-Alger-Oprah-Winfrey-lack-of -get-up-and-go, lack-
of-entrepreneurmanship-why-didn’t they-invest-in-the-market?
fault. 
 I was permitted to woo your class, however, as your monkey
entertainment, your we-have-liberal- aesthetics poet. You
would dangle money and privilege (jump, artist, higher!) at 
my nose.
Read on:
I have never forgotten who broke my father’s hands, my
mother’s back, the cost of my library cards. There are seven
billion of us and we have not forgotten where we came from,
who started the war.
You should never have let them teach us how to read.



READ AN EXCERPT FROM SLY BANG!

Thanks to Jonathan Penton of Unlikely Stories for publishing this excerpt from my novel, SLY BANG! You can purchase a copy from Amazon or from my publisher, Spuyten Duyvil, HERE 

READ SLY BANG HERE!!!


Monday, December 17, 2018

GREAT REVIEW OF SLY BANG BY DARRYL WAWA

Read Darryl Wawa's review

On reading Larissa Shmailo's "Sly Bang"

If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of  thinking, Larissa Shmaillo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with non-sensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all out madness, a batlle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs's Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godotand Frantz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds, who, by all means, should  stay away from a book like this. Things pop out of nowhere. Characters have multiple personalities that change right before your eyes in ways that make complete sense in the universe created by Shmaillo,but would otherwise make absolutely no sense. And the language, disguised in a veil of blatant grotesquerie, will need a subtle reader to decipher its gems and eloquence. The novel is hilarious, gruesome, repulsive, pervasively perverse, sadistic and moral like a Rick and Morty episode and the story takes place in a building of 300 floors going down, reminiscent of a concentration camp. Nora the protagonist is trying to save the world from an army of sadistic Nazi perverts with whom she is also in love. Other notable characters of the cast are: Michael, her lover, helper and serial killer, Ouspensky, the leading antagonist, sociopath, indiscriminate rapist and also her lover and Larissa, Nora’s interchanging alter ego, and also the supreme ruler of all of Russia. The only thing that seems linear in the novel is the progression of time.
Here are a few hidden gems from the novel, quotes that confess our human tragedy, spread throughout the madness of the book:

“Interesting idea here about false identity, on a spectrum, in all of us, the ego as opposed to the true self. Survival identities shed in recovery to reveal true being and oneness with God. We are all false; who am I to judge?
“Is it evil to destroy evil?” (p65)

 “AS I SEARCH MY HEART I SEEK FOR SOME EMBER OF WHAT I ONCE FELT AND I FIND ONLY SORROW GRIEF DISGUST AND SHAME… I AM SEEKING HELP FOR MY ADDICTION TO YOU SO THAT I DO NOT LAPSE INTO FANTASY AND A STUPOR OF NOSTALGIAC RECALL.” (p66).

“Michael burst into Hawk’s office and shoved the plate of macaroons into her face. He grabbed Nora and began the ascent up 300 flights. It took him 50 flights to realize that Nora, his Nora, was in his arms.
This is holding a real live girl, he mused. This is much better than oatmeal. Even better than hot, if that were possible.
Michael’s energy surged and he flew up the stairs. But by -201, Michael felt his energy drain.
I can’t carry her another two hundred flights, he realized.”  (p69)

““the mind cannot bear a hurt too great to the heart” (p124)

The effect on the reader, is one of  surprise and shock. The author cleverly interweaves poems in the novel as passages from the main character’s journal. The interlude, a historical anecdote about Nora’s parent’s during WWII and her ensuing upbringing, comes in the middle of the story to ground the reader. We are told of accounts of concentration camps and of an unlikely story of survival not as predictably drenched in heroism as it is in betrayal. This second part of the novel surprises as it is told in screenplay format at first, before reverting  back to an ordinary past tense narrative with a ‘normal’ progression. The anecdote traces back Nora’s origins. Along this second part, the sprinkled poems and passages confess  personal feelings, musings, and history of the main character, revealing her troubled upbringing and unsuccessful first marriage. But afterwards, the book goes back to its madness. The chaos continues, and our protagonist is once again trying to save the world. In its exploratively chaotic style, the story comes across as a description and metaphorical answer to quotidian psychopathology. It is a novel in which you can enjoy your own madness, if you are in that mood, but it does so in criticizing outdated masculine behaviors and championing female flexibility. It is a highly entertaining book and worth the read.

“We women will never forget. Those who do not remember history, as those of us who have been drugged and tormented and raped and pissed on and STILL REMEMBER ... I don’t even have words for the contempt I have for you predators.” (p178).


Darryl Wawa is a Port-au-Prince born Haitian-American who studied Photography and Creative writing. He enjoys chocolate and good books. That said, maybe a movie is a good book. He loves to work with images and words and their pairing.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

A NATIVITY POEM BY JOSEPH BRODSKY

NATIVITY (“NO MATTER . . . “ )
by Joseph Brodsky

Translated by Larissa Shmailo

No matter what surrounded them and
what the blizzard wailed at the sand,
that their shepherd’s den was close, nor
that they had no place else anywhere:
First, they were together. Second (mainly),
they were a threesome now, and, plainly,
all created, anticipated, or gifted for them
was now shared by three, at a minimum.
Above, in the icy sky over their camp,
with the habit of big towering over slight,
glittered a star, which, from then on, had
nowhere to hide from the baby’s sight.
The bonfire blazed till the log’s last ember,
and everyone slept. The star, unlike others,
greater than its glow, at its absolute nadir
could know an alien as a beloved neighbor.
                        ***
Не важно, что было вокруг, и не важно,
о чем там пурга завывала протяжно,
что тесно им было в пастушьей квартире,
что места другого им не было в мире.
Во-первых, они были вместе. Второе,
и главное, было, что их было трое,
и всё, что творилось, варилось, дарилось
отныне, как минимум, на три делилось.
Морозное небо над ихним привалом
с привычкой большого склоняться над малым
сверкало звездою -- и некуда деться
ей было отныне от взгляда младенца.
Костер полыхал, но полено кончалось;
все спали. Звезда от других отличалась
сильней, чем свеченьем, казавшимся лишним,
способностью дальнего смешивать с ближним.
Joseph Brodsky, 1990

Sunday, December 02, 2018

My Fibonacci Sequence Poem, "Aging," Up at Poetry with Mathematics

INTERSECTIONS: POETRY WITH MATHEMATICS


Aging (Fibonacci Sequence: 01123581321345589)



none
 
1(one) 

1(ego)  

two (I)

I 2 threeeeeeeeee

5 school, ruled 2 three   

hate math 8/5 parents split divisor 3 & me

bad teen luck black eight-in-hole no triskaidekaphobe call five ringtones call.

now lucky legal drink: I’m old-gold-rolled ready-to-hold; I stick on 13 so play vingt-et-un with me tonight.

still 13 in the soul, getting old with a balding, working luck. 34 is dirty floor & still behind, & the legal drink now a double, hit me hit me & no! not prime.

Fivefive, now fivefive, finally loving the mother/other/the 21-still-angry child & forgiving the serious careerist, so knowing, so sure, so 34. Take our bald inner luck as it comes, let’s leave the dirty floor alone (why are these aches all right ,why are these losses, these losses, so possible to endure?) Five years plus ½ century, decoding while eroding, ofivefive. 

89 am I 8 or 9? The young ones are 34, my children 55. There are 13 pills in the morning, 13 pills at night. But what, exactly what might happen next? A working soul and another season’s turn, what else did I ever have? This world is greater than my numbers, the poésie of my self. I take the garbage out and set it on the street with joy. Tell me your secrets: I am the one who truly wants to know. Lemniscate, I move toward ∞ today.

THREE REVIEWS IN NORTH OF OXFORD TOP 15!

Thrilled that THREE of my reviews have made the top 15 list for generating the most interest at North of Oxford! The fabulous books of poetry I reviewed are Thaddeus Rutkowski's BORDER CROSSINGS, Marc Vincenz's LEANING INTO THE INFINITE, and Michael T. Young's THE INFINITE DOCTRINE OF WATER'

READ NORTH OF OXFORD REVIEWS HERE

Friday, November 23, 2018

"ADOPTION" IN BENGALI-ENGLISH JOURNAL SHADOWKRAFT

Pleased that my poem "Adoption" appears in the bilingual Bengali-English journal SHADOWKRAFT.  Thanks to editor Subrankasar Das for the pub.

ADOPTION
I was not a mother until today.
The brand Trump is emblazoned on tents
and abandoned Walmarts.
Nannies wear jackboots, joke as
children cry.
Secretly, at night, children are taken
to undisclosed locations across the nation.
Where are the girls? With
the Roy Moores of the world?
Hear my NO.
Listen, Space Force:
I am the Horta, fighting for my children;
I will drive you from the planet.
Attention, big game hunters:
I am a tigress, risen from extinction,
to protest, protect the little cubs.
I, ordinary woman, with my instincts intact,
the maternal rising in me like a huge blue tide:
watch me topple the Orange Ozymandius.
What you have unleashed can’t be
lied to or stopped.
I am more than me, too;
I am the children, too.
6/21/18


"Johnny I Love You Don't Die" in Sound Poetry Library in Italy

Listen to it here! JOHNNY I LOVE YOU DON'T DIE

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Where Do Your Interests Lie?

As a white Eastern European woman, I know my interests are aligned with people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and other disenfranchised minorites. White male supremacists do not deem white women equal - they see us as slaves who also provide sex. Hitler spelled out the role of women in Nazi Germany: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). And evangelicals bring Biblical authority to the subjugation of women. As a white woman, my interests are #neverTrump: queer, worker, interfaith, rainbow, pink, diverse, global. And now more than ever, as fascism closes in, we had better realize where our interests lie. 

Wednesday, November 07, 2018

SLY BANG NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

My new experimental novel, Sly Bang, is now available from Amazon SLY BANG ON AMAZON

Larissa Shmailo’s SLY BANG is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battlefield of the psychosexual female libido.
Cecilia Tan, author of Slow Surrender'

SLY BANG IS ASTOUNDING! The "typhoid Mary of rape and murder," having been determined by alien pterodactyls to be "the only non-Nazi in the universe," teams up with a skinner-alive of pubescent virgins and ardent collector of Rothko daubs. Together they wage war against an ialdabaoth who intends, just for kicks, to atomize the universe by means of particle accelerators. Hyperspatial scene-shifts are conveyed by telepathy or supercomputer-assisted dialogue that bristles with snappy one-liners paced faster than a meth rant. Somehow, across these solar system-spanning pages, supercharged as they are with psycho-, neurobio- and quantum-physical erudition, the plot comes across vivid as anything Tolstoy ever evoked with his most considered panoramic prose. Larissa Shmailo's SLY BANG is like nothing that has ever been seen, or heard, anywhere.
Tom Bradley, author of Useful Despair

In this breakneck, futuristic, socio-sexual-psychological thriller, Larissa Shmailo tells the story of Nora Volkhonsky, a smart FBI agent targeted by multiple evildoers. As bad guys and worse guys close in on her, Nora’s main goal is to survive. She is helped somewhat by her “telepathic” powers, but her experience is often more dream than reality. “Who was sending these clangs and hoodoo messages? Who was receiving hers? Who wanted her insane or dead?” Fasten your seatbelt as you ride along a wicked highway with SLY BANG’s tough, spirited heroine.
—Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Border Crossings





Wednesday, October 31, 2018

NAZI "THEORISTS"

You need to know what the Nationalists read in order to understand their comic-book-like evil objectives. Their Nazi "theorists" would seem parodical, like Batman villains, if they weren't taken seriously by Bannon, Gorka, and Miller, and spoonfed to an eager president. Julius Evola, "fascist intellectual" (yes, an oxymoron), who wrote "rape is the ultimate manifestation of male desire," is a favorite of Bannon's, largely due to murky mysticism and even murkier thinking. Generally, Nazi theorists want to establish a dark age or feudal state with a few ubermensch lords. "Dark, I love dark!" Bannon rambles. This is the guy that Rebecca Mercer (Cruz and Trump funder) calls 'the Leni Riefenstahl of our movement." It's pathetic, but it plays with readers of The Daily Stormer.

Lineage

People often take me for Jewish, and that has always pleased me. My lineage is quite different (gentile, Ukrainian cossack, in fact). But, as some of you know, my parents and grandparents were interned in Nazi concentration camps during WWII, so I naturally gravitated to people with awareness about the Holocaust. There was also our shared love of borscht and horseradish and pickled fish. And - a certain tingling on the radar for Nazi catch phrases like "America First" and "I'm a nationalist." From what I've learned, we are witnessing the rise of Nazism in the United States, led by Trump, and although people of color, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ folk are the visible and immediate targets of the storm troopers he has incited to violence, trust me: we are ALL under attack. #neverTrump

Friday, October 26, 2018

AWP 2019 PORTLAND PANELS

Here are my two back-to-back panels for AWP 2019 in Portland!
Thrilled to be presenting with the likes of Erica JongAmy KingCecilia Tan, Kwame Dawes, Michael AnaniaMarc VincenzThaddeus Rutkowski, and Jonathan Penton!
Thursday, March 28, 2019
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Portland Ballroom 256, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
R214. The Critical Creative: The Editor-Poet. (Marc Vincenz, Larissa Shmailo, Michael Anania, Amy King, Kwame Dawes) This panel will offer an insiders' look into poetry editorship and publication from poets who edit prominent journals and presses. How do these tandem roles, poet and editor, influence one another? Do they detract from or enhance poetry publishing? Does the critical mind impede the creative mind or strengthen it? How? Are certain poetic schools favored? Where does preference end and narrowness begin? Panelists will offer real-life anecdotes and insights on poetry selection and editing.
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
B116, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
R223. Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position?. (Larissa Shmailo, Jonathan Penton, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Cecilia Tan, Erica Jong) In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that sex was not repressed in past centuries, but codified. How does contemporary hybrid sex writing crack these codes? Is there a relationship between gender politics and hybrid writing? How does hybrid writing give voice to marginalized gender identities? What is hybrid ecstasy? Is there a special connection between transgressive sex and hybrid writing? Panelists will discuss these questions with a focus on 21st-century writers.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

RULES OF PROPAGANDA

Do not underestimate Trump. He has effectively followed Hitler's racist and rapist playbook for power and has divided our nation to the point of civil war. We are surrounded by disinformation and propaganda and the press and freedom of assembly are in grave danger. 
Remember the rules of propaganda, of which Trump is a master, and teach others to resist.
1. Make the lie big.
2. Make it simple so that your least intelligent follower can grasp it.
3. Repeat it often.
And . . .
4. Accuse your opponents of what they accuse you, to confuse and undermine. If your followers are an angry mob, call Democrats an angry mob; if you are extreme and dangerous, call Democrats extreme and dangerous. Etc.
Watch for these tactics, and educate others, and resist, resist, ,#resist.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

In memoriam Irene Tara Shanahan Sargent

In memoriam Irene Tara Shanahan Sargent
my niece and godchild
March 28, 1969 - October 20, 2003
A poem I wrote on the plane to her funeral:
Aerial View of the Rockies

The gods like to trace their fingers in the world;
like leaves from a primordial tree, landforms
bare their veins. Clever of her to suicide this way
leaving no one but me to know. Impassive as
the dead face she wanted no one to see, clouds
hide rigor in the lines, purposeful or not, below.
In winter, sunrise looks like sunset in this distant
land, soon to be nearer, nearer, soon.

Thursday, October 18, 2018

SCARCITY

Listen:
If you wait but don’t want
If you want but don’t take
If you take but don’t use
If you use but don’t care
If you care but not much
The petty demon comes.
The petty demon says:
Not all of you are wanted
Not everyone is needed
A few may be accepted
There’s scarcity, you see
There are no loaves and fishes─
Not for the likes of you─
A few baguettes for baby
Some caviar for me
There’s just enough to shit and sleep
But not enough for thee.
The petty demon shrieks:
Time is money
Sell short
Eat to win
Assume the position.
In the world
In the angry material world
There are men who are not men
Men
Whose imaginations never rise
Whose imaginations squat
Upon the positions of power.
If the petty demon bothers you
Here’s what you say
Tell him:
I don’t know about
Your lawyer’s fees
Your MDs
Your CEOs
Your deep freeze
I do know that
The blind man is perfect
That there’s more to life than irony
And squealing like a stuck pig
That the truth is hard but you can stand on it
That time isn’t money or a threat but a gift.
As you assume your position
In the world
Do not love
Men who are not men
Whose imaginations never rise
Walk tall; walk with good
Assume nothing; take a position.
OCCUPYTRUMP#

In memoriam Sinaida Nikolayevna Gnatchenko Shmailo, October 16, 1923 - October 20, 2000

For my mother
MEMENTO MAMA
I haven’t passed that dream of wisdom,
the borders you crossed through.
I can’t translate the language
I thought I thought I knew.
I see a meaning, watching you die,
hold it in my hands like a graying sigh,
this lock of hair which I comb and tie.
I kiss the head which hears my no,
and meet your eyes, and say: Don’t go,
and leave you to this tongue of dread:
This is me, it cries, this is me and I die.
We will all speak these words in this way
and then, and till then, what shall I say?

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Khashoggi, M,B.S., and Trump's Complicity in Murder

As a member of PEN, I have a special animus against those who would harm journalists. One of ours - yes, with that foreign, Muslim name, Jamal Khashoggi - but one of ours, a Washington Post op-ed writer, a permanent resident of the US - has been tortured, brutally murdered, and (nightmarish) dismembered for criticizing Saudi strongman Mohammed bin Salman's repressive regime, a regime that flows millions every day into our president's coffers. Trump repays the Saudis by complicity in the cover-up of this crime. Don't let this stand: Demand sanctions under the Magnitsky Act from your representatives. First the journalists and dissidents, the Muslims, the people of color . . how many steps before it finally reaches you?

Sunday, October 14, 2018

An Intellectual Dark Ages

My worst fear about Trump et. al. is coming true: Trump is writing the history books. In the heartland, the age of the Earth is 6,000 years per Biblical begats and the theory of evolution is censored. Climate change research is not only ignored, it is destroyed. The Holocaust didn't happen; Helen Keller and Hillary Clinton have been removed from the curriculum in Texas; neo-Nazis and Confederates are "good people"; Republican candidates for Congress praise slavery. Evidence-based disciplines such as science and journalism are attacked as "fake." Trump's constant propaganda of big lies repeated often is working- our children are numb with apathy or animated with right-wing reaction. Unless a change comes soon, I see all Trump's lies dutifully recorded for future students, starting with "More people attended his inauguration than any in history, period."

Thursday, October 11, 2018

"Wrapped in myself, / trapped in myself"

A line from my poem, "Frog Prayer," is traveling across Tumblr: "I am wrapped in myself, trapped in myself." Thanks to violentwavesofemotion and others for quoting me! 

FROG PRAYER
Dark Light, stark Light, take me from the public bog
where I, frog, lurk, waiting for a divine arch
to spark the dog in me.
                   In me fight tedium, odium,
banal canals of waste; light, I squat and
slight, rape.
                   Slight rape forgiven? Dear God of Frogs:
Please goad, load me,
take my slippery smoothness, flippery foolishness away.
                   A way must be sound: I am wrapped in myself,
trapped in myself. My froggy self longs to produce, create;
but no, I seduce, berate.
                   Berate me, Tricolored Frog:
Light whose waste product is air, help me,
for as I sit and soak, I croak, I croak.

Monday, October 08, 2018

My Poem "&" Appears in Shrew

Delighted that my poem "&" appears in the current issue of SHREW, guest edited by Michael T. Young. I'm honored to be in the company of so many wonderful poets. 
https://www.shrewlitmag.com/issue8
&
My love, I see myself in a fur coat lying face down, drunk,
on the floor of the subway train, one heel lost, & I feel a
hardened man raping me, my virgin soul frost, & awards
are easy, mama says, & they may choose you, but,
they don’t know you, Ms. Boss, & my father says that I am
sexy & the time after that is lost & I know I am fat,
that I cost, & before she dies, mama says she wishes
I was never born, my death in my mother’s eyes, crossed,
but my love, see this chasm & wall here & be brave for me,
come swim the swamp around me & trust it is not within me,
or if it is, come love this swamp creature until it is drained,
and look at the dead in the moat, for here they will remain,
& sit here, still, with me & I will haltingly explain
I still love, beyond barbs, beyond wounds, beyond pain
.

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

Excited to share cover and blurbs for SLY BANG, my new novel

Larissa Shmailo’s SLY BANG is a futuristic hallucinogen of a novel that pervades your consciousness. Our heroine Nora could be the love child of Barbarella and Hunter S. Thompson if she grew up to be a telepathic FBI agent. Her story will make you wonder if all wars are truly fought on the battlefield of the psychosexual female libido. 
Cecilia Tan, author of Slow Surrender'

SLY BANG IS ASTOUNDING! The "typhoid Mary of rape and murder," having been determined by alien pterodactyls to be "the only non-Nazi in the universe," teams up with a skinner-alive of pubescent virgins and ardent collector of Rothko daubs. Together they wage war against an ialdabaoth who intends, just for kicks, to atomize the universe by means of particle accelerators. Hyperspatial scene-shifts are conveyed by telepathy or supercomputer-assisted dialogue that bristles with snappy one-liners paced faster than a meth rant. Somehow, across these solar system-spanning pages, supercharged as they are with psycho-, neurobio- and quantum-physical erudition, the plot comes across vivid as anything Tolstoy ever evoked with his most considered panoramic prose. Larissa Shmailo's SLY BANG is like nothing that has ever been seen, or heard, anywhere.
Tom Bradley, author of Useful Despair

In this breakneck, futuristic, socio-sexual-psychological thriller, Larissa Shmailo tells the story of Nora Volkhonsky, a smart FBI agent targeted by multiple evildoers. As bad guys and worse guys close in on her, Nora’s main goal is to survive. She is helped somewhat by her “telepathic” powers, but her experience is often more dream than reality. “Who was sending these clangs and hoodoo messages? Who was receiving hers? Who wanted her insane or dead?” Fasten your seatbelt as you ride along a wicked highway with SLY BANG’s tough, spirited heroine.
—Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Border Crossings

Available for pre-order at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang.html

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