Steeplechase

Poems

Beginning with the first few words of Steeplechase, ‘Not mine but I’ll take some— / not too much,’ you can be sure Angela Ball will engage you with care, with wit, with every magical thing a poem can do. Her way forward always includes a few back and forth and sideways steps. She offers us ‘Belief / that no knowledge is permanent / or impossible.’ If it’s an autobiography you want, if it’s biography, if it’s how to grieve, if it’s romance, you will find it in Ball’s Steeplechase. You will also find yourself smack dab in the middle of poetry unlike any other, with ‘play kisses that are real,’ and where smiles can be camouflage, and a steeple may be raised high up to show the faithful the way to church. I love to give a book like this to a friend, to read it with me, to keep it close by.
Dara Barrois/Dixon, author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

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.

80 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

February, 2026

isbn : 9780822967651

Subjects

about the author

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.

learn more
Angela Ball