This Afterlife: Selected Poems

Selected Poems brings together poetry from A. E. Stallings’s four acclaimed collections, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, as well as a lagniappe of outlier poems. Over time, themes and characters reappear, speaking to one another across years and experience, creating a complex music of harmony, dissonance, and counterpoint. The Underworld and the Afterlife, ancient history and the archaeology of the here and now, all slant rhyme with one another. Many of these poems unfold in the mytho-domestic sphere, through the eyes of Penelope or Pandora, the poet or Alice in Wonderland. Fulfilling the promise of the energy and sprezzatura of Stallings’s earliest collection, her later technical accomplishment rises to meet the richness of lived experience: of marriage and motherhood, of a life lived in another language and country, of aging and mortality. Her chosen home of Greece adds layers of urgency to her fascination with Greek mythology; living in an epicenter of contemporary crises means that current events and ancient history are always rubbing shoulders in her poems.

Expert at traditional received forms, Stallings is also a poet of restless experiment, in cat’s-cradle rhyme schemes, nonce stanzas, supple free verse, thematic variation, and metaphysical conceits. The pleasure of these poems, fierce and witty, melancholy and wise, lies in a timeless precision that will outlast the fickleness of fashion.

“Stallings has a couple of primary modes. The first, as you can see, is calm, grave and almost withdrawn; she uses this frequently with poems that seem to touch on more personal material. Her other mode is self-consciously witty and often a bit goofy … even the most elegant snowman is completed by a carrot.” NYTBR

Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
Imprint: Farrar Strauss & Giroux US
Publication date: 14/02/2023