Poetry Book Launch: In My Absence by Stella Padnos-Shea

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Stella Padnos-Shea releases her debut full-length poetry collection, a luminous collection that serves as an antidote to mindless busy-ness and ersatz ‘connectedness,’ and a choice accompaniment to solitude. Refreshments will be served.

About In My Absence:

Stella Padnos-Shea’s debut full-length collection of poetry, In My Absence, is being released in August 2016 by New Hampshire-based Winter Goose Publishing. Padnos-Shea methodically categorizes the book’s subthemes: “maternal ambivalence, marital discord, childbirth/labor, infidelity, grief, racism, feminine experience, masturbation, religion.”

Padnos-Shea will be reading from her book at both Powerhouse on 8th as well as at the Pen Parentis series at the Andaz Wall Street Hotel in early 2017; additional performances to be announced.

Elaine Equi, author of Sentences and Rain (among many others) from Coffee House Press, says of the collection: “Stella Padnos-Shea’s words glow with passion, with anger, with pain. Can one be brutally original, as well as honest? In her case, yes. ‘Balancing between tears and desire,’ she tells us ‘ambivalence is my middle name.’ She tells us ‘what they don’t tell you’ about suicide, marriage, motherhood – the forging and breaking of bonds. And somehow, miraculously, she does it all with chilling clarity and darkly playful wit. This book – as animated as it is intense — is one of the most impressive debut collections I’ve seen.”

Dean Kostos, author of This Is Not a Skyscraper and Rivering, offers: “Stella Padnos-Shea’s wild, brave poems seem to be overheard—as if the reader were eavesdropping on an altercation between the speaker and another. The poet taunts, ‘You must know I’m evil, / I am not made of pure love for you, / ambivalence is my middle name.’ Her trenchant words cut through labyrinths of anger and regret. Ironically seductive, this broken speaker finds shelter in meticulously constructed stanzas the way a fetus inhabits a womb. With lapidary precision and Plathian candor, the poet achieves something approximating birth—one that also acknowledges its death. Transforming absence into presence, she addresses the self and the reader, ‘In ecstatic ash / you are younger than ever, / time your only crease’.”

Of her own work, Stella humblebrags: “Not luminous, not ethereal, not numinous. These poems you are holding, as you do toothpaste or whiskey, are firmly sustained for use on earth. This book is a fine antidote to mindless busy-ness and ersatz ‘connectedness,’ and a choice accompaniment to solitude.” One of Stella’s ex-boyfriends coos, “You smith like a wizard.”

About the Poet:
Poet, social worker, mama, Scorpio, and suicide survivor are among the identities of Stella Padnos-Shea. Her poetry appears in various literary journals and forums, including Women’s Studies Quarterly, Mommikin, and Lady Parts, a Barbie-themed collaboration with jewelry artist Margaux Lange. Stella currently works as a political organizer and therapist in New York City. Her first book, In My Absence, is forthcoming this summer from Winter Goose Publishing. Her poetry is public and personal, neck and neck.