Beanstalk Release

August 4th, 2026 - 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM With lacerating irony and ruthless wisdom, Shelley Stenhouse’s collection, BEANSTALK, unmakes the fairy tale. Her larger-than-life father in his Burberry raincoat, her mother’s gnarled dragon hand, the money that courses through her family but isn’t real to her until it’s gone. Her imagery is sharp, visceral, effortless, funny. Her portrayal of herself is unflinching. Stenhouse bravely admits her many failings in a manner that sidesteps any notion of the “confessional” poem, always connecting us to our own complex truths. She writes about the problem of love, about the identities we are born into or feel should save us, about clinging to possessions to make sense of our impermanent world. About the million lonely truths of a long life: “Love is the coat I never bought, and after I never bought it, / I never bought it again.” Shelley Stenhouse has won a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Allen Ginsberg Award, and her poem “The Great Cosmic Hum” won the Palette Poetry Prize. She was shortlisted for the 2025 Moth Poetry Prize, won third place in Australian Book Review’s 2024 Jolley Short Story Prize, and was a National Poetry Series finalist. She won the Pavement Saw Press Award for her poetry collection, PANTS, and her collection, Impunity, was published by NYQ Books. Her work has appeared in Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, The Common, New York Quarterly, Quarterly West, Third Coast, and Brooklyn Rail, among others. Her story “Another Suburban House in the Seventies” is forthcoming in The Iowa Review. Shelley lives in Greenwich Village with her cat, Pop.