Like

by A. E. Stallings

Overview

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

A stunning new collection by the award-winning young poet and translator

Like, that currency of social media, is a little word with infinite potential; it can be nearly any part of speech. Without it, there is no simile, that engine of the lyric poem, the lyre’s note in the epic. A poem can hardly exist otherwise. In this new collection, her most ambitious to date, A. E. Stallings continues her archeology of the domestic, her odyssey through myth and motherhood in received and invented forms, from sonnets to syllabics. Stallings also eschews the poetry volume’s conventional sections for the arbitrary order of the alphabet. Contemporary Athens itself, a place never dull during the economic and migration crises of recent years, shakes off the dust of history and emerges as a vibrant character.

Known for her wry and musical lyric poems, Stallings here explores her themes in greater depth, including the bravura performance Lost and Found, a meditation in ottava rima on a parent’s sublunary dance with daily-ness and time, set in the moon’s Valley of Lost Things.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374719180
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/25/2018
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	846,435
File size:	247 KB

About the Author

A. E. Stallings is the author of the poetry books Archaic Smile, which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax, which won the Poet’s Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award; and Olives. She has also published a verse translation of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things. Stallings is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Athens, Greece.
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.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

After a Greek Proverb

TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE I ASCII]

We're here for the time being, I answer to the query —
Battle of Plataea: Aftermath

Out of Book Nine of the Histories of Herodotus

THE SPARTAN GENERALS

After the blood-brimmed field, we were amazed to stride into those empty silken tents — bright tapestries, wrought silver ornaments, the furnishings of solid gold. Eyes glazed at all the untold booty: gods be praised! Our king bid foreign cooks spare no expense to make the meal our foes would eat, prepare their pastries, spices, wine. Such slowly braised flesh melting off the bone! Such colors, scents! Our king laughed as he laid out on the cloth, beside the feast, our ration of black broth: "Behold! They came to rob us of our fare!" We also laughed, though fed up with that food, the soldier's mess, the black broth of blood.

THE CONCUBINES

We heard the Greeks had won. At once I went and decked myself with every bracelet, ring, gold necklace that I owned, and rouged my cheeks, and hastily had my maids arrange my hair. The other concubines slumped in despair; but I'd been snatched from Kos; my people, Greeks! Dressed in white robes of silk, we fled the tent, and drove through corpses, far as the eye could see, until I saw Pausanias, the king. I stepped with golden sandals through the gore, the lady that I was, and not the whore, and knelt, a supplicant, Please set me free. The roar of blood like silence in my ear, until: "Lady, arise, be of good cheer."

LAMPON THE AEGEINITE

"Your glory after this victory is sealed," I told Pausanias, to please him. "Now crown it with revenge for Leonidas beheaded at Thermopylae. Remember the restitution that Xerxes denied us, and how he said Mardonius would pay it? Well, here is the cadaver — you just say it — and we'll impale Mardonius's head." He stood in silence as his face went somber. "Stranger," he addressed me, "on this field the crime was well avenged." As for that corpse, who knows what happened to it? There are versions — the truth is not so straight it never warps. Someone interred it — so I've heard it said — and reaped a handsome bounty from the Persians.

THE IMMORTALS

He called us the Immortals — the select companions who would battle at his side, Mardonius on his white charger. Pride, we felt, of course; maybe we half believed we were that day, not helmeted or greaved, no golden scales under the robes we wore. We wielded wicker shields for catching arrows. We were surrounded, as on mountain hunts a pack of Spartan hounds surrounds the boar. In that tight space, we knew our hopes were wrecked, like ships, frail bridges over Hellesponts, the horsewhipped waters bridling at the narrows. We were caught up in doom, as fish or sparrows, grateful like other men to die but once.

ARISTODEMUS THE COWARD

I lie here without honor, as I willed. Alone among those at Thermopylae I lived — if it is life to loathe each breath. They say I was the bravest Spartan here, but that I broke formation, and I fought not only as one not afraid of death, but one who seeks it, battle-mad, distraught. A Spartan soldier never leaves the line. It took so many Persians to get killed, I slogged on, drunk with slaughter as with wine. And when at last I met the foeman's spear, I laid my body down like shame, now free to fall amidst the dust, having fulfilled the ranks of the two hundred and ninety-nine.

Bedbugs in Marriage Bed

Maybe it's best to burn the whole thing down,

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Like"
by .
Copyright © 2018 A. E. Stallings.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

TITLE PAGE,
COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
DEDICATION,
After a Greek Proverb,
Ajar,
Alice, Bewildered,
Art Monster,
Autumn Pruning,
Battle of Plataea: Aftermath,
Bedbugs in Marriage Bed,
Cast Irony,
Colony Collapse Disorder,
The Companions of Odysseus in Hades,
Crow, Gentleman,
Cyprian Variations,
Denouement,
Dutch Flower Painting from the 1670s,
Dyeing the Easter Eggs,
Eheu,
Empathy,
Epic Simile,
The Erstwhile Archivist,
First Miracle,
For Atalanta,
Glitter,
Half of an Epic Simile Not Found in Hesiod,
The Last Carousel,
Lice,
Like, the Sestina,
Little Owl,
Lost and Found,
Memorial (Mnemosyno),
Momentary,
The Mycenaean Bridge,
The Myrtle Grove,
Night Thoughts,
Pandora,
Parmenion,
Peacock Feathers,
Pencil,
Placebo,
Psalm Beginning with Two Lines of Smart's Jubilate Agno,
The Pull Toy,
Refugee Fugue,
The Rosehead Nail,
The Sabine Women,
Scissors,
Sea Urchins,
Selvage,
Shattered,
Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda,
Silence,
Similes, Suitors,
Sounion,
The Stain,
Summer Birthdays,
Sunset, Wings,
Swallows,
Variation on a Theme by Ouranis,
Whethering,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ALSO BY A. E. STALLINGS,
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
COPYRIGHT,