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...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Want books like This Afterlife?
Our community of 12,000+ 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.
1,298
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like This Afterlife, you might also like...
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
Dark Fae Outcast
Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.
But while scoring his last…
