My Trick Wants to Go to Plato's

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560 Brooke Avenue, South Bronx

 560 Brooke Avenue ¹

The walls, barbed wire, barbed, next to a

drive-by window of Burger King: Dios, is

this your way? Electric doors, opened one

at a time, they make a sound, it maddens.

All the time the boys do time, all the time

they say, “Lunacy, this is crazy, crazy mad.”

It is. “Nigga, nigga,” one boy prays, farts as

the fat guard twists his hand: He tries to laugh,

he cries instead, porque? Scared, so scared,

his scarred voice cracks, 15. “Nigga, ay, I here

4 murder,” he lies. O child, perhaps so. My

Jesus of the got-nailed, my Angel of the why,

& what could you have done yet, & why are you

here, porque, my God, & donde vamos, u & I?

 1.      A maximum security juvenile detention facility in the South Bronx

Recording of my poem "Phylum" up at The Common Online today!

Recording of "Phylum" at The Common

Rain Taxi review of my translation of Victory over the Sun

Rain Taxi review of Victory over the Sun

Coverage for PATIENT WOMEN in OSM, the global citizen's network

L. Shmailo’s Patient Women Explores Mental Illness, Prostitution in NYC

New Book Explores Mental Illness, Alcohol, Drug and Sex Addiction, and Prostitution in 1970s New York 

Lifelong New Yorker Larissa Shmailo presents the novel Patient Women (BlazeVOX [books], 2015). Patient Women focuses on the tragedies, misadventures, and growth of one Nora Nader, born of Queens and darling of the New York disco scene. As the Era of Rock unravels, we follow Nora through her experiences as a runaway, low-dollar and high-class prostitute, party girl, and working stiff, into her story of self-awareness and addiction recovery as she “finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.” (K.R. Copeland, Midwest Book Review).
At twelve years old, Nora leaves her Holocaust-survivor parents and explores the worst that New York has to offer. From there, we follow her through mental hospitals, alcoholism, and the accidental drowning of her husband on their honeymoon. We meet her fellow prostitutes and travel with them as they attempt to move to other careers. We bear witness to Nora’s tepid experiences in psychotherapy and her extraordinary relationship with her transgender AA sponsor. We go with her as she returns to Queens to learn about her parents’ ordeal in the camps and also recovers her own suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Through Nora, we track the spiral of history, and how individual New Yorkers experience the underside of the 1970s—both its horrors and the redemption that could be found there.

Patient Women reveals its author’s background as an accomplished poet and translator, and has been praised for balancing divergent literary styles while remaining an accessible page-turner. Second-generation Holocaust survivors, recovering addicts, and those experiencing mental illness will recognize their own stories in Patient Women, and find an insightful, well-written mirror that allows them to explore and articulate both their struggles and their triumphs.
Patient Women is a useful tool for individuals and groups studying the disco era and the AIDS crisis of New York in the 1970s and 80s. With its frank and thorough analysis of bipolar disorder and mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, recovery, and incestual child abuse, it is of interest to therapists, therapy groups, and reading groups with an interest in recovery issues.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic living in New York. Her translations from Russian include the iconic avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun. Ms. Shmailo is available for booking at (212) 712-9865.
More information can be found at www.LarissaShmailo.com, including the Electronic Press Kit for Ms. Shmailo and Patient Women (with high-resolution photos) at www.larissashmailo.com/…/larissa_shmailo_electronic_press_k…. Patient Women is available for purchase through Amazon, and at on-line and physical bookstores.

A press release by Jonathan Penton
jonathan@unlikelystories.org, (337) 207-8713
Contact Larissa Shmailo
larissa@larissashmailo.com, (212) 712-9865

Rock and roll heaven: the visionaries

Official press release for PATIENT WOMEN

Friends, here is the official press release for PATIENT WOMEN, If you know anyone who would like to review, please share.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Novel Explores Drug and Sex Addiction and Recovery in 1970s New York
Contact: Jonathan Penton
jonathan@unlikelystories.org, (337) 207-8713
or
Larissa Shmailo
larissa@larissashmailo.com, (212) 712-9865
Lifelong New Yorker Larissa Shmailo presents the novel Patient Women (BlazeVOX [books], 2015). Patient Women focuses on the tragedies, misadventures, and growth of one Nora Nader, born of Queens and darling of the New York disco scene. As the Era of Rock unravels, we follow Nora through her experiences as a runaway, low-dollar and high-class prostitute, party girl, and working stiff, into her story of self-awareness and addiction recovery as she “finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.” (K.R. Copeland, Midwest Book Review).
At twelve years old, Nora leaves her Holocaust-survivor parents and explores the worst that New York has to offer. From there, we follow her through mental hospitals, alcoholism, and the accidental drowning of her husband on their honeymoon. We meet her fellow prostitutes and travel with them as they attempt to move to other careers. We bear witness to Nora’s tepid experiences in psychotherapy and her extraordinary relationship with her transgender AA sponsor. We go with her as she returns to Queens to learn about her parents’ ordeal in the camps and also recovers her own suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Through Nora, we track the spiral of history, and how individual New Yorkers experience the underside of the 1970s—both its horrors and the redemption that could be found there.
Patient Women reveals its author’s background as an accomplished poet and translator, and has been praised for balancing divergent literary styles while remaining an accessible page-turner. Second-generation Holocaust survivors, recovering addicts, and those experiencing mental illness will recognize their own stories in Patient Women, and find an insightful, well-written mirror that allows them to explore and articulate both their struggles and their triumphs.
Patient Women is a useful tool for individuals and groups studying the disco era and the AIDS crisis of New York in the 1970s and 80s. With its frank and thorough analysis of bipolar disorder and mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, recovery, and incestual child abuse, it is of interest to therapists, therapy groups, and reading groups with an interest in recovery issues.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic living in New York. Her translations from Russian include the iconic avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun. Ms. Shmailo is available for booking at (212) 712-9865.
More information can be found at www.LarissaShmailo.com, including the Electronic Press Kit for Ms. Shmailo and Patient Women (with high-resolution photos) at www.larissashmailo.com/…/larissa_shmailo_electronic_press_k…. Patient Women is available for purchase through Amazon, and at on-line and physical bookstores.
# # #

Text of my poems in Plume

Two Poems |
Larissa Shmailo

YOUR PROBABILITY AMPLITUDE

I glance and
a boson blinks
into view.

A strong force
beckons

even as
a weak force
radios decay.

The gravity
of the situation

the magnetism

I observe and
my attention

turns particles into power
tracks into trails
whims into waves.



A fragment from The Llatease of Homey, from a recently discovered Mycenaean text.
. . . Cythera of the white and widening arse who stalked
strong Lactid on the Bluvian Isles; ah, strong-latted Lactid,
of the swaying sword whose droop in battle was legend
from the Bluvias to the Effluvias to the damp and puddly
Lluvias; a legend, god-written, and of Elera smitten (to whit,
her Attic tits), clad of Hephaestus’s mittens.
Ah, Bluvias, where the gold and green and pink and silver
and ivory and indigo and carmine and slightly beige-ish-off-
mauve-ish fishes fall to the net and the bent, spent trident
of Poseidon, who, green-maned, sea-stained, and a tad
weight-gained, also wore Hephaestus’s mittens as he
made love to Cythera, who looked a bit like Elera,
except fatter in the arse.
Unlike Myrcon the Dorkan, unmittened and unbitten,
on the shores of Elephantinople, where the nasty biting
ponies play in spent, bent Poseiden’s spray . . .
(Here the fragment of The Ilatease ends.)

Two poems in Plume

My poems, "Your Probability Amplitude" and "A fragment from the Ilatease of Homey, from a recently discovered Mycenaean text," appear in the January 2016 issue of Plume http://plumepoetry.com/2015/12/two-poems-larissa-shmailo/

New Year's Resolution

To suspend judgment and criticism of myself and others; to be kind to my writing.
If I can do that, I will have accomplished a lot in 2016!
Happy New Year, you guys!

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.

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.

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.