Winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series
“The speaker of Star in the Eye is wide-awake in a dreamscape, navigating an illustrated netherworld where the ‘Plane’s Controls Come Off in My Hands’ and a love affair can be distilled into the titles of unwritten haikus—all in the same poem. Again and again James Shea brings us to the edge of the unknown and points into the darkness, until our eyes adjust and we see that he is pointing at himself, already there. These poems make me wish I had the same dreams Shea has, and after reading this book it seems possible—anything does.”
—Nick Flynn
“With a simplicity of phrasing, directness of address, and nimble first-mindedness, the poems in Star in the Eye convey great depth, zest, and mystery. Their brevity is anathema to fragmentation; instead playfully and mordantly, they honor ‘what will suffice,’ as Stevens says, with a calligraphic precision and flair. If anyone could cut a diamond with a paintbrush, it would be James Shea—his work is so marvelous; utterly lucent and revivifyingly strange.”
—Dean Young
