Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds

At once literary and conversational, enigmatic and lucid, exuberant and wounded, these nimble poems wed the world of imagination to the world of experience. Every jaunty line explodes in at least two directions: devilishly up into the mind; ardently down into the heart.

Terrance Hayes

Winner, 2006 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Winner, 2008 Poetry Award from Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters

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.

More Praise

In these new poems, Angela Ball conducts a tender, eerie traffic in dreams of conversation. In this hotel, as in the splendid, ghostly hotel assemblages of Joseph Cornell, boundaries between image and viewer, poem and reader, life and afterlife, quietly disappear. In the eyes of the night clerk, all worlds become one. The vision is thrilling."

Donald Revell

'I want to be you,' says a poem in Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. Achilles, Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Beethoven, Breton, Borges, Byron, Coleridge, Cortez, de Chirico, Freud, Garcia Marquez, Guillaume, Kipling, Magellan, Marilyn Monroe, Menelaus, John Stuart Mill, Rimbaud, Larry Rivers, Sartre, Tolstoy, Pancho Villa, Wordsworth, and a few stellar others meet in the surprising pages of this desperately beautiful book. Thereafter they're free to mingle ever more strangely in one's newly ignited imagination.

Dara Wier

Ball gives her reader a world as complex as its characters, as challenging as the dichotomies humans create. Ball brings energy and humor to subject matter that is both complex and trivial, making ['Night Clerk'} a book worth sleeping with.

Crab Orchard Review

Navigates nimbly between narrative and language and mapping the bright territory in which imagination suffuses the mundane. Droll, allusive, plaintive in an ironic pitch, Ball's lyrics defy reader expectations as they develop, dodging and burning to create vibrant sound patches and images.

The Hollins Critic

Table of Contents

Sample

80 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

October, 2007

isbn : 9780822959755

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

Angela Ball is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of five previous poetry collections: Kneeling Between Parked Cars, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. She is the recipient of an NEA grant and has twice won the Poetry Prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry, on the Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, and has been frequently anthologized.

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