Like, A. E. Stallings
Like, A. E. Stallings
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Like
Poems

Author: A. E. Stallings

Narrator: A. E. Stallings

Unabridged: 2 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/06/2019


Synopsis

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

A stunning new collection by the award-winning young poet and translator.

Like, that currency of social media, is a little word with infinite potential; it can be nearly any part of speech. Without it, there is no simile, that engine of the lyric poem, the lyre’s note in the epic. A poem can hardly exist otherwise. In this new collection, her most ambitious to date, A. E. Stallings continues her archeology of the domestic, her odyssey through myth and motherhood in received and invented forms, from sonnets to syllabics. Stallings also eschews the poetry volume’s conventional sections for the arbitrary order of the alphabet. Contemporary Athens itself, a place never dull during the economic and migration crises of recent years, shakes off the dust of history and emerges as a vibrant character.

Known for her wry and musical lyric poems, Stallings here explores her themes in greater depth, including the bravura performance Lost and Found, a meditation in ottava rima on a parent’s sublunary dance with daily-ness and time, set in the moon’s Valley of Lost Things.

About A. E. Stallings

A. E. Stallings is the author of several books of poetry: Like, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Olives, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax, winner of the Poets’ Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award; and Archaic Smile, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. She has also published verse translations of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days, as well as the Homeric epic The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. Stallings is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2011 United States Artists Fellow, and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Athens, Greece.


Reviews

Goodreads review by ANNA on February 18, 2024

this was an amazing amazing amazing set of poems. I would (personally) like to thank comprehensive exams for being such an amazing place (to introduce us to a poem by A.E. Stallings). I would buy this collection for "Lost and Found" alone because oh wow wow wow I can't stop thinking about so many of......more

Goodreads review by Charles on December 06, 2018

I loved about half of the poems in this book so much - subtle lyrics, a lot of them playing on the word "like" in contemporary culture. Then there were the other half, which mostly have to do with Greek culture and ancient Greek art. Your mileage may vary here, but for me they felt sterile. Very glad......more

Goodreads review by James on June 03, 2019

I enjoyed this immensely. I don't read much poetry like this anymore, that of form and pattern and rhyme, and I think for that reason I found reading Stallings's lyrics on nature and the everyday reflecting our world as well as the classical relaxing, even comforting.......more

Goodreads review by Mery ✨ on September 19, 2021

3/5 Pulitzer Prize Nominee She wrote her poems in formal verse. Which is to say, rhyme, but it feels natural. Like subtle music when you read them. I admire how she approaches to nature and grace, the issues of everyday life, urban landscapes, friendships--all the quotidian matters of life. I’m gla......more

Goodreads review by Christie on September 10, 2023

Perhaps one of the greatest living poets, Stallings is skilled in rhyme and meter. Her work is thick-woven with classical allusions, but most of subjects are wonderfully ordinary— glitter, scissors, a sea urchin, a pull toy— and considered with language that banters and surprises, imbuing the "every......more


Awards

  • Pulitzer Prize - Finalist
  • The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year