Praise for Archaic Smile

"Like many of her other readers, a few years ago I first discovered A. E. Stallings' remarkable poems in Poetry and immediately wanted to read more.  And now here's her first volume, a collection of empathic poems sometimes speaking from behind somber Greek masks, sometimes engaging in delicious flights of beautifully rhymed and metered fancy--poems about dread and dreams and the underworld as well as demons and vultures and turtles and willows and umbrellas.  Archaic Smile is a collection in which splendid formal technique merges with voices lifting out of the mist.  In love with Greece, A. E. Stallings is in love with the world.  Raves are in order:  This brilliant debut immediately puts Stallings very much in the front rank of young American poets." Dick Allen

"One can almost prophesy that, for a poet, classical training imposed on a contemporary sensibility and subject matter, will result either in paralyzing inhibitions or a liberating perspective furthered by an empowering discipline.  There is nothing inhibitied about the work of A. E. Stallings, and its discipline is stunning.  She can write about large subjects--the largest--without making them grandiose and about small subjects--the smallest--without trivializing them.  You will find in her poems love and death and insects and come away having learned more about all three than you would have thought possible at this late date.  She has the gift, rarer among poets than you might think, of matching conception exactly to detail, and the detail is irresistible:  "the flame that flaps upon its wick...the weight and weightlessness of change."  As with any born technician (not, I think, a contradiction) the simplest devices turn to gold in her hands, and the technique always has a purpose:  to make us realize that the ancients, their heroes and heroines, their gods and goddesses, with their frequent follies and their occasional miracles, were not really like us.  They were us." Turner Cassity

"A. E. Stallings' poems have the strength and tension of 'the invisible line pulled taut.'  Familiar myths receive unexpected voicings, unfamiliar events take on resonant aspect.  Witty, surprising, sturdy, Archaic Smile is a collection of fresh pleasures." Fred Chappell

"A. E. Stallings's Archaic Smile marks a debut of geniune distinction.  At a time when so much new poetry seems somber and lackluster, Stallings displays extraordinary powers of invention and delight.  Here is a first book that is both slyly original and irresistibly personable." Dana Gioia

"This is a startling first book of poems, charged with so much energy that it practically kicks the reader in the teeth.  Readers who expect poetry to give them a refreshing jolt will by regaled . . .  It is a pleasure to hail the arrival of A. E. Stallings." X. J. Kennedy in The Classical Outlook

A recommendation from Sherman Alexie, from his web site (scroll down page):  Sherman Alexie, Stuff

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