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.
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.