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A. E. Stallings

 

 

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who studied Classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford.  She has published four collections of poetry, Archaic SmileHapax, and Olives, and most recently, Like, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has published three verse translations, Lucretius's The Nature of Things (in rhyming fourteeners!), Hesiod's Works and Days, and an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. A selected poems, This Afterlife, is just out from FSG in the US and Carcanet in the UK.

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She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.  She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She speaks and lectures widely on a variety of topics, and has been a faculty member at conferences such as the The Sewanee Summer Writers' Conference and Breadloaf.

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Having studied in Athens, Georgia, she now lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist, John Psaropoulos. They have two children, Jason and Atalanta.

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"The main thing Stallings has going for her is that she’s good at writing poems. . . . Stallings’s work imagines the poet as an artisan, and her poems satisfy in the way a handblown glass bowl satisfies; they have heft and shape; they rest solidly in the palm." ―David Orr, New York Times Book Review

"Perhaps America’s best living poet . . . In This Afterlife, [Stallings] has assembled her best work into an anthology that no one who still believes in poetry’s power to move, persuade, and surprise should miss." ―Timothy Sandefur, The Objective Standard

"In the poems collected in This Afterlife―especially the ones set in the here and now―Stallings demonstrates that in the right poet’s hands, the putative everydayness of the hic et nunc can be transformed into something every bit as rich and strange as even the most ancient myths." ―Ryan Ruby, The Nation

"Stallings’s formal ingenuity lends a music to her philosophically and narratively compelling verse. She [crafts] clever yet profound meditations on love, motherhood, language, and time. A particular pleasure is seeing certain personae―Persephone, Daphne, and Alice (of Wonderland)―recur throughout, accompanied by ever-deepening resonances." ―The New Yorker

"Stallings’s new book, This Afterlife: Selected Poems, is a major event . . . Poems are either memorable or not, and This Afterlife is loaded with the real stuff, the right stuff, the kind of lines you remember." ―Jason Guriel, Air Mail

"[O]ne of the strongest talents to emerge in recent years."

Poetry Magazine

 

"A. E. Stallings is not a perfect poet but a poet of perfection, with the patience and courage to bring to her poems what American poetry so rarely knows how to give, and American readers hardly dare to receive; lapidary finish of both form and reading." 

 

The Yale Review

 

"The most gifted formalist of her generation . . . There are haters of such pleasures, to be sure; they are legion. But I think the poetry of A. E. Stallings will outlast them."

 

The Hudson Review

 

[of Lucretius,  The Nature of Things] "One of the most extraordinary classical translations of recent times."

 

Peter Stothard, TLS

 

 

 

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