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Editor’s note: In Chris Song’s essay, James Shea’s Last Day of My Face (University of Iowa Press, 2025) is read in relation to Hong Kong as both a lived city and a literary space. Song writes as a critic and longtime friend, situating Shea’s poetry within the city’s Anglophone community and his own shared history with the poet. Through close readings, the essay shows how Shea’s compressed lyrics draw philosophical depth from ordinary scenes, affirming Hong Kong as a site of sustained poetic thinking.

[ESSAY] “Last Day of My Face, Past Light of a City: Reading James Shea and Hong Kong” by Chris Song

Click HERE to read all entries in Cha 
on Last Day of My Face.

James Shea, The Last Day of My Face, University of Iowa Press, 2025. 76 pgs.

James Shea’s poetry collection Last Day of My Face has been awarded the 2024 Iowa Poetry Prize. Established in 1990, the Iowa Poetry Prize was originally known as the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award and received its current name in 1993. Until 2001, eligibility was restricted to poets who had already published at least one collection; it has since opened its doors to emerging voices. The prize recognises book-length poetry manuscripts, and the University of Iowa publishes the winning manuscript as a collection in the following year. Volumes in this series have gone on to receive numerous distinctions, including the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, among others.

Born in the United States, Shea received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he first embarked on his dual vocation as poet and translator. In 2013, supported by a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant, he came to Hong Kong Baptist University to teach in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing. He later became an associate professor in the department and served as Programme Director of the creative and professional writing programme. Since 2018, he has been involved with the International Writers’ Workshop, first as Associate Director and now as Director, quietly shaping Hong Kong’s international literary life and building corridors between local and global communities of writers.

Now living and writing in Hong Kong for more than a decade, Shea’s entry into the distinguished lineage of Iowa Poetry Prize winners not only further consolidates his standing within contemporary American poetry, but also carries a particular resonance for the poetry world in the city: a face shaped by two cities, fixed for a moment in the light of an international accolade, before it changes and goes on speaking in new ways across languages and shores.

Shea is the author of three poetry collections. His debut, Star in the Eye (2008), selected by Nick Flynn for the Fence Modern Poets series, was also featured in the Academy of American Poets’ “New American Poets” series curated by Sarah Gridley. His second collection, The Lost Novel (2014), was named one of The Volta’s “Books of the Year” in 2015. His third collection, Last Day of My Face, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2024 Iowa Poetry Prize, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2025. Together, these books trace a trajectory from the intimate image to the global page, each volume offering a different way of looking, and of being looked at.

Since settling in Hong Kong in 2013, Shea has also worked from within the city’s literary landscape as a translator. With Dorothy Tse, he co-translated Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong. The book, the result of eight years of painstaking collaboration and revision, was finally published in 2022. That same year, the Education University of Hong Kong’s “One City One Book Hong Kong” programme centred its community reading initiative on this volume, and a series of events, interviews, reviews, and critical essays followed across major literary journals. The contribution Shea and Tse have made to Hong Kong poetry through translation has allowed a local poet’s voice to travel outward and to return refracted through another language.

From a scholarly perspective, Shea has also made important interventions in the study of Hong Kong literature. During his tenure at Hong Kong Baptist University, he has examined Chinese- and English-language creative writing curricula across the city’s universities, exploring how pedagogical practices engage with techniques of “defamiliarization” in the classroom. His research extends to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, whose creative writing degree-granting programme and international residency scheme enjoy a distinguished reputation in world literature. A graduate of Iowa’s creative writing programme himself and a scholar rooted in Hong Kong, Shea is singularly positioned to re-examine archival and historical materials. His work has carefully traced how the “Poetry Workshop”, founded by Dai Tian during the Cold War, was influenced by the International Writing Program, and how poets such as Wan Kin-lau and Gu Cangwu, during their time in Iowa, encountered global leftist thought and overseas activism related to the Defend Diaoyu Islands movement. In this way, Shea’s practice weaves together teaching, research, writing, and translation, mapping the currents that run between Iowa City and Hong Kong, and between the lyric line and the historical world it inhabits.

Shea’s poems are marked by their brevity and compression: within a sharply limited space they capture the intersections of memory, identity, and perception, and probe the delicate ties between individual feeling and more universal concerns. His work moves continually between the concrete and the abstract, tracing with fine precision the circuits of resonance that run between the outer world and the inner life. With a calm yet penetrating touch, he offers readers an occasion to reconsider how the self relates to its surrounding world. His measured but forceful mode of writing stands against the shallowness and restlessness of the present, while steadfastly affirming a humanistic conviction that poetry is a way of thinking. In an age saturated with agitation and unease, Shea’s language appears all the more rare, all the more necessary.

Shea seldom sets out his poetics explicitly in prose. In the small number of brief essays where he does, a few sentences stand out as particularly revealing of his aesthetic commitments: “Breathing itself is an expression, a ‘pressing out’ of one’s breath, and even the dead have their own rhetoric. A poem exists in this continuum, arising both as an expression and a turning inward towards the nature of expression. The difficulty and the pleasure of writing a poem lie in the way that it must surpass or match the strange and continuous expression inherent in the world.” In what follows, I turn to three poems from Last Day of My Face as an introduction to Shea’s work: three brief spaces in which the face of the world, and of the self, appears, vanishes, and returns.

In “Sun Broker” (p. 1), Shea attends with unusual acuity to the textures of the everyday. Lines such as “Lifeguards can’t save themselves / from their own wasting” and “The sun’s beams reach / the patio in a tie” set up a charged tension between the concrete and the abstract. These scenes of daily life are not merely representations of an external world; they are projections of inner feeling, from which the poem draws out a distinctly philosophical register. In this way, the work makes the ordinary shimmer with latent depth. When we read “a mute pool in winter,” a seemingly simple image opens into an atmosphere where space and time quietly intersect, summoning reflection on those intervals of pause and muteness that mark a human life. The pool’s silence is, on the surface, a fact of routine; yet the poet transforms it into a symbol for the flow and arrest of existence itself.

Shea’s gaze lingers on the contradictions and intensities concealed in the everyday. The line “The sun’s beams reach / the patio in a tie” deftly catches a fleeting visual impression while intimating the world’s inextricable tangles, those knots for which no easy untying exists. In the closing lines, “A chance to make up for the luxury of not understanding,” “not understanding” names both an acceptance of life’s intrinsic uncertainty and a renewed scrutiny of understanding itself. Only a subject who approaches life with humility can attempt such “make up” for the privilege of remaining in the dark. From these small, precise details, Shea distils meanings that reach beyond the self, interweaving individual experience with philosophical inquiry in a sustained exploration of what it means to exist at all.

In “Times” (p. 20), Shea offers a finely tuned meditation on shifting subjectivities, especially in the play of gazes between the speaker and the streetlights. The poem opens with the line, “I saw the streetlight turn on from my bedroom window,” establishing the poet firmly in the role of observer. Yet as the poem unfolds, this seemingly one-directional act of looking begins to destabilise. “the bulbs will bloom for hours, I’m inclined / to sit here and watch until they flick off at dawn”: one pair of eyes fixed on a pair of lights, as if four eyes were momentarily locked. What appears to be passive contemplation quietly endows the streetlights with a kind of subjecthood. They do not merely illuminate; they answer.

In the latter half of the poem, the speaker’s position slips from the one-who-looks to the one-who-is-looked-at. The streetlights cease to be inert objects and instead return the gaze, their glow functioning as a form of watchfulness. This shift in perspective enacts a mutual permeation and transformation of subjectivities. The final three lines push this interplay to its highest point. Light becomes the figure through which the speaker redefines their own subjectivity, entering into a symbolic continuity with the light of the streetlamps. The speaker is both the witness of light and, in a sense, its embodiment. This movement of subjectivity, circulating between human and nonhuman, reveals a doubled inquiry into self and other, observer and observed. It discloses an ongoing reflection on the porous boundaries between person and object, life and what we are tempted to call the lifeless.

The interaction of subjectivities in the poem is not confined to the speaker and the lamps. The steadiness and flicker of light carry temporal weight: they hint at the passage of hours and the brevity of a human life, suggesting our fragile position within the larger universe. The closing phrase, “many lights may look as one,” further links the individual to the collective, the particular beam to a more general radiance, quietly inviting the reader, the unseen “audience,” into the poem’s field of vision. The philosophical reflection staged here both concludes within the poem’s final line and begins anew outside it, as the reader, too, becomes part of the exchange of gazes in which all lights, and all lives, briefly converge.

In “Fissure” (p. 21), Shea stages an encounter between the natural world and human experience. Through finely grained attention to the subtle movements of animals, as in “A white stoat in the woods, / graceful and inquisitive, / part spiritus, its pulsing heart / nearly visible under its fur,” the poem renders the fragility and quickened aliveness of life in nature, while also offering a kind of praise for the singular existence of each creature. The following lines, “squirrels in every direction, / unashamed of hunger, snow / melted,” are vividly concrete yet quietly metaphorical. The melting snow suggests restoration and renewal in the natural world; being “unashamed of hunger” articulates an elemental instinct, an unapologetic drive to live.

The poem then lifts these specific images into a more overtly philosophical register through the projection that “the earth to be / covered in anything but / sunlight.” Here, abstraction opens onto an intuition of nature’s endurance and a sense of existence as something at once finite and transcendent. In the latter half of the poem, the speaker’s experience becomes densely interwoven with the landscape: “an alien deer / sees me, my head fits into / the hollow of a tree.” The poet is no longer merely a spectator of nature but participates bodily and mentally in it, entering the scene as one of its inhabitants. When “sundrops / on my neck, hard to stand / how still a deer can stand,” the speaker and the deer echo one another, their gestures and stillness forming a shared field of perception. The boundary between inner and outer worlds grows porous, so that natural phenomena and human feeling resonate in a deeper, reciprocal key.

Across these three poems, Shea consistently draws profound philosophical reflection out of the textures of the everyday. His work does more than chart the subtle exchanges between outer world and inner life; it also probes the ways subjectivity expresses itself, interacts with other forms of subjectivity, and comes to apprehend its own conditions of existence. At the same time, his poems articulate a distinctive understanding of the relation between human beings and the world they inhabit. Whether he is describing a fragment of nature or unfolding a more explicitly philosophical question, his language remains composed and penetrating, creating a quiet yet forceful space of thought. In that space, the value and meaning of poetry itself are affirmed, not as ornament or escape, but as a sustained mode of attention and inquiry.

In recent years, a number of Hong Kong based Anglophone poets have received international recognition, and Shea once again brings a new brightness to the city’s literary landscape. These prizes are not only acknowledgements of individual achievement but also signal to the wider world that there are poets in Hong Kong who write in English, and that extraordinary poems can come into being here. Such work is in no way lesser than poetry written anywhere else. It asserts, quietly but firmly, a claim for Hong Kong, for its language, its imagination, and its right to be heard.

The Anglophone poetry community in Hong Kong is, roughly speaking, composed of three overlapping groups: expatriate poets living in the city, local poets who write primarily in English, and diasporic Hong Kong poets whose lives are stretched across multiple geographies. By its very nature, this community is loose, unregulated, and constantly in flux. High mobility makes sustained cohesion difficult. It is hard to form long term, stable collectives devoted to writing, criticism, research, and translation, and harder still to maintain enduring, structured conversations with Sinophone poets and with the broader Sinophone literary sphere in Hong Kong. With a few exceptions, Anglophone poets in the city are little known; to write poems in English here is, more often than not, to inhabit a solitude.

And yet, individual and seemingly incidental encounters can matter a great deal. My first meeting with Shea did not take place in Hong Kong at all, but in Bangkok, where we were both attending a conference organised by Asia Pacific Writers & Translators Inc. in 2013. That year, he had just moved to Hong Kong, and he made the journey all the way out to visit me in Tuen Mun, the westernmost district of the New Territories. We talked about poetry and about life at universities, sharing a sense that both were, in some way, inseparable. Later, we travelled together to Shenzhen, visiting that neighbouring city’s cultural and artistic landmarks. In the years that followed, we collaborated repeatedly in Hong Kong, supporting each other’s events and initiatives. Whether in small local gatherings or at larger international festivals, we found ourselves participating in various ways. Alongside the efforts of other poets, editors, translators, scholars, and publishers, there were, for a time, unmistakable signs of a burgeoning literary moment in Hong Kong.

However, what happened in Hong Kong and the larger world in the past decade scattered us like loose pages across the world. When I think back on those days in Hong Kong, reading poems together and talking about them late into the evening, they return with a startling immediacy, as if they had only just happened, and yet they are already part of another time, a memory that feels both distant and close, like a city glimpsed from across the water…

^{Chris Song & James Shea, “Poetry Reading at Dusk”, Backreading Hong Kong 2018 Symposium, Saturday 5 May 2018.}

^{How to cite: Song, Chris. “Last Day of My Face, Past Light of a City: Reading James Shea and Hong Kong.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 12 Dec. 2025. chajournal.com/2025/12/12/last-day.}

Chris Song is a poet, editor, and translator from Hong Kong, and is an assistant professor teaching Hong Kong literature and culture as well as English and Chinese translation at the University of Toronto. He won the “Extraordinary Mention” of the 2013 Nosside International Poetry Prize in Italy and the Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts) of the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. In 2019, he won the 5th Haizi Poetry Award. He is a founding councilor of the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation, executive director of the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, and editor-in-chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. He also serves as an advisor to various literary organisations. [Hong Kong Fiction in Translation.] [Chris Song & ChaJournal.]