Steeplechase

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.

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.