This Afterlife: Selected Poems--A. E. Stallings in conversation with Ashley Norwood Cooper

This event takes place on zoom, Community Bookstore's virtual event platform. Register here.

Charis and Community Bookstore welcome A. E. Stallings in conversation with Ashley Norwood Cooper for a discussion of This Afterlife: Selected Poems. A selection of sharp, witty, and impeccably crafted poems from A. E. Stallings, the award-winning poet and translator. This event is co-sponsored by the Agnes Scott College Classics Department and Emory University Classics Department.

This Afterlife: Selected Poems brings together poetry from A. E. Stallings’s four acclaimed collections, Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like, as well as a lagniappe of outlier poems. Over time, themes and characters reappear, speaking to one another across years and experience, creating a complex music of harmony, dissonance, and counterpoint. The Underworld and the Afterlife, ancient history and the archaeology of the here and now, all slant rhyme with one another. Many of these poems unfold in the mytho-domestic sphere, through the eyes of Penelope or Pandora, Alice in Wonderland or the poet herself. Fulfilling the promise of the energy and sprezzatura of Stallings’s earliest collection, her later technical accomplishments rise to meet the richness of lived experience: of marriage and motherhood, of a life lived in another language and country, of aging and mortality. Her chosen home of Greece adds layers of urgency to her fascination with Greek mythology; living in an epicenter of contemporary crises means current events and ancient history are always rubbing shoulders in her poems.

Expert at traditional received forms, Stallings is also a poet of restless experiment, in cat’s-cradle rhyme schemes, nonce stanzas, supple free verse, thematic variation, and metaphysical conceits. The pleasure of these poems, fierce and witty, melancholy and wise, lies in a timeless precision that will outlast the fickleness of fashion.

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.

Ashley Norwood Cooper’s intensely colored, painterly, figurative work explores the creative lives of women, the awkwardness of family relationships, and the unpredictability of the natural world. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in the US and Europe including First Street Gallery (NYC), ZINC contemporary (Seattle) and Galerie Thomas Fuchs (Stuttgart, Germany). Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and on the I Like Your Work Podcast. Her debut at VOLTA NYC 2020 garnered write ups in the NY Times and Arcade Projects Zine (Columbia University). Ms. Cooper’s paintings are included in public and private collections in the United States and Europe including the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (San Francisco) and Greenville County Museum of Art (South Carolina).