In this episode, hosts J. Bradley Minnick and Mary Ellen Kubit interview American poet A.E. Stallings about her collected poetry book, This Afterlife, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Culling from her first four books, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), and Like (2018), This Afterlife shares her most compelling poems from the past 25 years and some uncollected works. The book is centered around poems that combine traditional forms, sonnets, sestinas, and lesser-known forms like pantoums. Imagining the music of our everyday lives— she takes up themes of parenting, fairytales, mirrors, and even a broken washing machine.
Glitter
All that will remain after an apocalypse is glitter.
— British Vogue
You have a daughter now. It's everywhere,
And often in the company of glue.
You can't get rid of it. It's in her hair:
A wink of pink, a glint of silver-blue.
It's catching, like the chicken pox, or lice.
It travels, like a planetary scar.
Sometimes it's on your face, or you look twice
And glimpse, there on your arm, a single star.
You know it by a hand's brushing your neck—
You blush—it's not desire, not anymore—
Just someone's urge to flick away the fleck
Of borrowed glamour from your collarbone—
The broken mirror Time will not restore,
The way your daughter marks you as her own.
Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry and 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.
A very special thank you to Nervous Verbs and R. Ring, Kelley Deal and Mike Montgomery, for sharing their music. The episode sound design was created by Candyland Recording Studio.
Executive Producer and Host J. Bradley Minnick is the author of The Bankrupt Circus and Other Misadventures by Silent Clamor Press.
Generous funding for Arts & Letters Radio is provided by Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from listeners like you.
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Executive Producer and Host: J. Bradley Minnick
Senior Producer: Mary Ellen Kubit
Episode Producer: Mike Montgomery
Episode Mixed and Mastered by: Mike Montgomery of Candyland Recording Studio
Music, Sound Design and Effects: Mike Montgomery