Angela Ball

Angela Ball’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Boulevard, Conduit, Poetry, The Oxford American, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The North American Review, The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Grand Street, Field, Colorado Review, The New Republic, The Bennington Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Talking Pillow. The recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches in the Center for Writers, part of the School of Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.

Steeplechase

Poems

By Angela Ball

Steeplechase explores multiple landscapes, including Mississippi and its many church steeples; countries known and unknown; cities and inhabitants both aspirational and lost. Its voice is humorous, bewildered, disillusioned, hopeful. The book’s temporal setting is the two years of extra life granted a partner after catastrophic illness and surgery: love’s last compelling season. It celebrates the inexhaustibility of language.

Talking Pillow

By Angela Ball

Talking Pillow celebrates love as amazement, sustenance, and the progenitor of scarce-believable loss. The book centers around the sudden death of the author’s long-time partner and travels outward to events in the world at large. Imagining themselves into multiple times, places, and lives, the poems comically explore the possibilities of attachment between people and the absurdity of death’s sudden intrusion. Antic and often funny, these poems converse with all that we care about, fear, and fail to understand.

Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds

By Angela Ball

Winner of the 2006 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry Selected by Terrance Hayes

Winner of the 2008 Poetry Award from Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters

Angela Ball’s lyrical, wry, and rueful poems float on a river of incongruities on which we may find Ron Popeil, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling sharing the same raft; they create a fascinating commerce between the sublime and the ridiculous.