Please join us to celebrate the launch of This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A.E. Stallings, the Poetry Book Society Winter Special Commendation 2022. Hosting the reading will be poet and critic Ange Mlinko. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

‘The ancients taught me how to sound modern,’ A.E. Stallings said in an interview. ‘They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.’ For her, ‘technique’ is rooted in traditions of strict forms and metres, an interest that sets her apart as modern – and American – in challenging ways, for being on the face of it old-fashioned, yet ambitiously experimental among the forms she uses.

Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, she lives in Athens, Greece. Her poems come out of life’s dailiness – as a wife, mother, teacher, an expatriate between languages, a brilliant translator of ancient and modern Greek. She also translates Latin, her most notable large work being the Penguin Lucretius, translated into fourteeners.

Being a poet in Greece entails, for her, being part of that world. She was among volunteers helping refugees as they arrived in Greece, and their experience haunted her to write, ‘My love, I’m grateful tonight / Our listing bed isn’t a raft / Precariously adrift / As we dodge the coast guard light…’ The sharp quatrain commends the observation to memory. The poems, without self-indulgence or confession, are intimate as they address ‘My love’, children or friends.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Please note that there is a limited number of places for the reading, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please contact us to let us know. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete the Zoom registration here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RqMv9VUATKWs3dxA3GFVlQ

About the speakers:

A.E. Stallings is a U.S.-born poet and translator who lives in Greece. She studied Classics at the University of Georgia (in Athens, Georgia) and Oxford University, and lives now in Athens. She has published four volumes of poetry (Archaic Smile, Hapax, Olives, and Like), and three volumes of verse translation, including Lucretius’ The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days with Penguin Classics. She has been awarded numerous prizes for her translation and poetry, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur fellowship. Her poetry book, Like (FSG), was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

Ange Mlinko is the author of six books of poetry: Venice (2022); Distant Mandate (2017); Marvelous Things Overheard (2013), which was selected by both the New Yorker and the Boston Globe as a best book of 2013; Shoulder Season (2010), a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award; Starred Wire (2005), which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Matinees (1999). She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2014-15; served as poetry editor for The Nation from 2013-16; and her criticism, for which she was given the Randall Jarrell Award by the Poetry Foundation in 2010, appears regularly in the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. She teaches poetry at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and is poetry editor for the journal Subtropics.