Talking Pillow - University of Pittsburgh Press

Talking Pillow

Talking Pillow is as intimate as a dream. In mourning her losses, the poet turns them into a new morning of the imagination peopled by a beloved companion and a cast including agents from the TSA and the FBI, Lon Chaney, Robert Frost, a young benefactor, and the glorious ghost of Anna Akhmatova.

David Lehman

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.

More Praise

Some poetry gives us a place to put away carefully what comes of living. All through Talking Pillow we get to know Angela Ball's stories of life, love, death, passion, grief, stamina and perseverance; we get to know her passion for words, 'faint patronymics of gaud', and we get to understand what mysterious life can do. When she says something is like 'swimming for the first time/underwater', we feel how true that is, how good it can be to be understood.

Dara Wier

Table of Contents

Sample

72 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

November, 2017

isbn : 9780822965152

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

Poetry / American / General

about the author

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.

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