Book description
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…
Why read it?
1 author picked This Afterlife as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Is Stallings, an American who lives in Greece, the best poet now writing in English? I think she may be.
This new collection reprints poems from her previous slim volumes. Her verse is often about quotidian and domestic life, and she combines wit with depth. Her craftsmanship is superb, with brilliantly agile use of language, and she is the most interesting rhymer since Louis MacNeice. She also draws sometimes on Greek mythology.
Friends reading her for the first time have told me how astonished they are that they hadn’t heard of her. Hers is a unique voice, and a compelling…
If you love This Afterlife...
These Blue Mountains
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Want books like This Afterlife?
Our community of 13,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like This Afterlife.
Share your top 3 reads of 2025!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,395
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like This Afterlife, you might also like...
Need to Know
The authoritative but accessible history of the birth of modern American intelligence in World War II that treats not just one but all of the various disciplines: spies, codebreakers, saboteurs.
Told in a relatable style that focuses on actual people, it was a New Yorker "Best of 2022" selection and…
Tsunami
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
