Thanks to Kimberly Ray Copeland for her review of PATIENT WOMEN, to appear in the Midwest Book Review this month.
Poet/novelist Larissa Shmailo's latest offering, Patient Women, is a raw, unfaltering, fictional story (heavily peppered, no doubt, with the author’s own personal anecdotes) that follows the tumultuous life of one highly likeable Nora Nader - a self-deprecating heroine with an indelible edge.
Nora, the daughter of an overbearing mother and an emotionally detached father; both Nazi prison camp survivors, is determined to assert herself and make her way through the world according to her own rules and regulations. Her whirlwind journey begins in 1970's Queens, NY, where Nora, at the tender age of 12, leaves home and takes to the inhospitable streets of NYC.
While battling a plethora of personal demons, including; sex, drug, and alcohol addiction, as well as severe depression (“I’m never happy. I always feel like Auschwitz inside”), we watch in horror as our protagonist devolves from Ivy League student, to waitress, to prostitute (“The best blow job in NY”).
Both physical and emotional abuse is prevalent throughout the course of Nora’s life, and slowly but surely long-buried secrets are unearthed.
With unrelenting determination, and a little help from her friends (specifically, a drop dead gorgeous drag queen turned AA sponsor named Chrisis, who assures Nora, in regards to sobriety/recovery, “If I can do this, anybody can.”) Nora finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.
At moments painstakingly heart-wrenching, at others, hopefully poetic, Patient Women is ultimately an in-your-face tale about the resilience of the human spirit, in the midst of familial and societal discord, and the ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.

Dear friends, here's a preview of my new novel, Patient Women, a story of a woman's journey through sex addiction, substance abuse, the Woodstock and punk rock crazy years, to recovery and love and a life as an artist (my story).
Read PATIENT WOMEN preview

We just finished the fourth leg of our Unlikely Saints tour of Southern Louisiana, with shows in New Orleans, Baton Rouge. Lafayette, and Grand Coteau. What an experience! The poetry, the music, the dancing, the food, and most of all, the people! Thanks to Jonathan Penton for organizing this mindblowing word trip! I'll be back for more crawfish, zydeco dancing, and southern love soon!

Friends, please vote for PATIENT WOMEN in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2015 for best fiction! My poet protagonist Nora and I really appreciate your vote  Cast your vote in the FICTION category.
Please vote for PATIENT WOMEN here!THANKS!
Voted for Patient Women in the Opening Round of the 2015 Goodreads Choice Awards: Best FictionVote for the best books of the year! Check out the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award nominees in 20 categories!2015 Goodreads Choice Awards: Best Fiction.  

Dear friends:
There is one day remaining in the Patient Women Goodreads Giveaway.
Please enter to receive a free signed copy! 
Click here for details: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160212-patient-women

Dear friends:
There are six days remaining in the Patient Women Goodreads Giveaway.
Please enter to receive a free signed copy! 
Click here for details: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160212-patient-women

Dear friends:
Enter the PATIENT WOMEN Goodreads Giveaway for a chance to win a FREE signed copy of my new novel. PATIENT WOMEN has been called "a brutally honest wrestling match of truth-telling and sex" and "the best book . . . about this period of life in NYC since Patti Smith's Just Kids."  Hailed as stylistically brilliant (thank you, readers!) in its use of poetry, journal entries, flash, and innovative narrative, PATIENT WOMEN has chapters about prostitution, the Holocaust, incest, and the post-Woodstock era.
Enter here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160212-patient-women

       
   

   

     

      Buy a copy: Patient Women
     
      THANK YOU!

          by Larissa Shmailo
     

     

         
            Giveaway ends November 06, 2015.
         

         
            See the giveaway details
            at Goodreads.
         

     
   
   



    Enter Giveaway

I am very pleased that my poem, "Gaia's Lunacy," appears in John Tranter's new Journal of Poetics Research. 

Here is the text of the poem:

GAIA’S LUNACY
The Sun is hot and bothered, and libidinal, having fatheredall our mendicants and tycoons, cops and robbers, and our rife loons.
The Earth below is verdant, child of Eros, green, exultant for solar love would bask her with his sure heat and not task her,
but treasure all her madmen, all her masters and their bondsmen,thus offering a devotion of which our Gaia has no notion.
The fickle Earth presumes a love from solar powers as enough;Her denizens expect the same and bask in glory with no name.
Now, the music of the spheres should play loud in one's own earsBut creation's power's assumed, and unheard by all us loons.
Journal of Poetics Research:http://poeticsresearch.com/article/larissa-shmailo-poem-gaias-lunacy/

Dear Louisiana friends, I am so excited to be visiting the legendary cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette for the very first time. I'll be reading from my books In Paran, #specialcharacters, and my new novel, Patient Women. I hope to see you at my readings there! Tuesday, November 3, 7pm-9pmElevator Projects451 Florida St., Suite 102, Baton Rouge(in the downtown Chase building)No cover, wine providedReaders include Xander Bilyk (New Orleans), Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)
Thursday, November 5, 6pm sharp-8pm sharp:Crescent City Books230 Chartres St., New OrleansNo cover, wine providedReaders include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Carolyn Hembree (New Orleans), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Christopher Shipman (New Orleans), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)
Friday, November 6, 7:30 pm-9:30pmThe Ballet Académie200 Polk St., LafayetteNo cover, wine providedReaders include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), Larissa Shmailo (NYC), and John Warner Smith (Baton Rouge)

My essay on Philip Nikolayev's embedded sonnets,  The Combinatorics of Context, appears in Italian in the international journal Grafias, This essay originally appeared in The Battersea Review edited by Ben Mazer.

http://www.grafias.it/i-sonetti-integrati-di-philip-nikolayev-la-combinatoria-del-contesto/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“UNLIKELY SAINTS”Literary events in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and LafayetteSupporting the Festival of Words, Lyrically Inclined, and Unlikely Books
                                                CONTACT:    Jonathan Penton                                                                        (337) 207-8713                                                                        jonathan@unlikelystories.org
 In the first week of November, 2015, south Louisiana publisher Unlikely Books will join with Lafayette’s premiere open-mic-and-slam series, Lyrically Inclined, and the Festival of Words in Grand Coteau in a celebration of the literature produced by and available to south Louisiana readers. Six writers from south Louisiana will join Larissa Shmailo of New York City, Michael Harold of Shreveport, and Wendy Taylor Carlisle of Eureka Springs, AR in a series of three literary events featuring diverse backgrounds, styles, and literary themes.The events are called the “Unlikely Saints” tour, mimicking a similar tour in November 2011. Flyers and publicity photo attached.
Tuesday, November 3, 7pm-9pmElevator Projects451 Florida St., Suite 102, Baton Rouge(in the downtown Chase building)No cover, wine providedReaders include Xander Bilyk (New Orleans), Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)
Thursday, November 5, 6pm sharp-8pm sharp:Crescent City Books230 Chartres St., New OrleansNo cover, wine providedReaders include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Carolyn Hembree (New Orleans), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Christopher Shipman (New Orleans), and Larissa Shmailo (NYC)
Friday, November 6, 7:30 pm-9:30pmThe Ballet Académie200 Polk St., LafayetteNo cover, wine providedReaders include Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Eureka Springs, AR), Michael Harold (Shreveport), Alex “PoeticSoul” Johnson (Lafayette), Dylan Krieger (Baton Rouge), Larissa Shmailo (NYC), and John Warner Smith (Baton Rouge)

The fifth annual One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change, New York City edition, will be held at the Sidewalk Cafe on Saturday, Sept. 26th. This event was curated by Valery Oisteanu, and will be MC'd by Ron Kolm,

Readers include Claudia Serea, Tom Walker, Allan Graubard, Kat Georges, Peter Carlaftes, Ronnie Norpel, Bill Wolak, Larissa Shmailo, David St-Lascaux, Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky, Shelley Miller, Carl Watson, Wanda Phipps, Jeff Wright, Ilka Scobie and Kelvin Daly.

All thanks to Michael Rothenberg for creating this wonderful world-wide event for peace!

Sidewalk Cafe
94 Avenue A, New York, NY 10009
6:00 pm
(212) 473-7373

Probably the biggest surprise of my summer reading was Patient Women by Larissa Shmailo. Shmailo is a highly accomplished poet, editor, and translator (see my review of her poetry in Issue # 169) . She does a lot of so-called "mixed" media, and she blogs at larissashmailo.blogspot.com. She is productive and successful, and lives a rich life in the arts.
She is also a survivor and child of survivors, and in her new novel Patient Women, she fictionalizes pieces of her life and recreates passages from her parents' lives as well as creating searing poems ostensibly written by her character Nora Nader.There is plenty of recreational sex and drugs and drinking and also sex work, and brilliant recreations of the downtown milieu of New York City in the nineteen seventies. Much, much sensation and despair and struggle. There are whorehouse discussions during down time about what you want in an ideal client, and there are stunning shocks: at one point, Nora finally finds a man who has potential as a long term partner. They marry-- and he drowns on their honeymoon. Nora's life is out of control, but the novel is completely in the novelist's control. In her great confidence in her own powers, Shmailo moves towards the end out of the straight narrative into a series of experiments in story telling and genre. The bulk of the book is the grim narrative of Nora's dive into the lower depths and her grumbling return to sobriety through the efforts of a saintly trans friend who is dying of AIDS. Then, Nora begins to press her mother to repeat and explain family stories of their time in concentration camps under the Nazis: how they survived intact. She includes her mother's stories as free-standing short works, and it becomes increasingly clear that the family was not intact at all. The stories throw Nora into a near psychotic state of remembering that seems like too much for one person to bear. She says goodbye to Chrisis, her dying sobriety sponsor. She gives support to a dying stranger, money to a beggar. She notices that the world is still around her. And then come the poems, which act both as a reprise of the themes and events of the novel and also also as unnarrated evidence of Nora's talent and hopeful future. It is a gamble, to end a novel with so many passages in a different genre, but it pays off beautifully: Nora doesn't forget, perhaps doesn't even move on completely, but she can be with people. She can create.

I'm deeply grateful to Meredith Sue Willis for her review of Patient Women (read below). She has fully understood my protagonist's (and my own) salvation: we can create; we can be with people.

Books for Readers review of Patient Women

I'm delighted to be interviewed by the wonderful MegTuite in the current issue of Connotation Press,with excerpts from my new novel, Patient Women, and a PTSD poem.
Connotation Press interview with Larissa Shmailo

Dive into the deep end: read this novel! Unforgettable and mesmerizing!
By M. Tuite on August 27, 2015
There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. "Patient Women" is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by "Patient Women". WOW!!! Unforgettable!

Delighted that our upcoming launch for Patient Women is featured in the Village Voice! You are all coming, right?
VILLAGE VOICE COVERAGE OF LARISSA'S LAUNCH PARTY

For immediate releasePress contacts:Larissa Shmailo212-712-9865Larissa@larissashmailo.comRegina Khidekelrussculture@aol.com
Russian Launch Party for Larissa Shmailo’s Patient Women Uncle Vanya’s315 West 54th Street New York, NY 212-757-0168Tuesday, September 8, 20157:00 to 10 pmFREE; open to the publicNew York City. A real Russian launch party will celebrate the publication of poet Larissa Shmailo’s debut novel, Patient Women, on September 8. Sponsored by the Russian American Culture Center, the event features the talents of a glittering host of prominent Eastern European and New York City literary figures, including Alex Cigale, Steve Dalachinsky, Bonny Finberg, Andrey Gritsman, Patricia Spears Jones, Ron Kolm, Irina Mashinski, Yuko Otomo, Audrey Roth, and Thad Rutkowski.About Patient Women Patient Women has been called “a brutally honest wrestling match of truth-telling and sex”and “the best book . . . about this period of life in NYC since Patti Smith's Just Kids.” Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire, writes: Larissa Shmailo’s Patient Women tells the story of Nora, a gifted young woman who comes of age in New York against heavy odds. Her Russian mother is demanding; the young men around her are uncaring; and her dependence on drink and sex leads her to a shadowy life filled with self-made demons. Yet Nora’s intelligence pulls her through the difficult times—there are even moments of (very) dark humor here. Anne Elliott, author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, adds:Christ-figures are likely to be cross-dressers in this engaging bildungsroman, which takes us on a wild ride through NYC nightclubs of the 1970's, rock-bottom blackouts, a whorehouse, and the slogan-filled rooms of recovery. Surreal and lyrical, then bawdy and riotous, then plainspoken and tragic, Patient Women had me rooting hard for its lovable, drowning heroine to keep her head above water and let in grace.The Russian American Cultural CenterThe Russian American Cultural Center (RACC) sponsors readings, art exhibitions, film screenings, and other events of interest throughout New York; for more information about RACC, see their website at http://www.russianamericanculture.com/ The launch party for Patient Women is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing by the author at the event. Patient Women is also available on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Patient-Women-Larissa-Shmailo/dpa/1609642015

Friends, save the date! The NYC launch party will happen Tuesday, Sept. 8 at 7:00 pm at Uncle Vanya's, 315 W 54. Readings by Alexander Cigale, Steve Dalachinsky, Bonny Finberg, Patricia Spears Jones, Ron Kolm, Irina Mashinski, Yuko Otomo, Audrey Roth, Thaddeus Rutkowski, yours truly, and other special guests. More details as I get them.This event is sponsored by the Russian American Cultural Center, so it will be a blast. I absolutely hope to see every single one of you there!
Patient Women

I'm thrilled at Chris Campanioni's brilliant review of my poetry collection, #specialcharacters.  Let me know what you think! 

Brooklyn Rail review of #specialcharacters