Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds

Angela Ball’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Poetry, Oxford American, The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, North American Review, The New Yorker, Field, Colorado Review, The New Republic, The Bennington 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 at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.

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.