Talking Pillow

by Angela Ball

Overview

Talking Pillow celebrates love as amazement, sustenance, and the progenitor of scarce-believable loss. The book centers around the sudden death of the author’s long-time partner and travels outward to events in the world at large. Imagining themselves into multiple times, places, and lives, the poems comically explore the possibilities of attachment between people and the absurdity of death’s sudden intrusion. Antic and often funny, these poems converse with all that we care about, fear, and fail to understand.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822983156
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	12/11/2017
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Angela Ball is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of five previous poetry collections: Kneeling Between Parked Cars, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. She is the recipient of an NEA grant and has twice won the Poetry Prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry, on the Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, and has been frequently anthologized.

Table of Contents

Contents The Last Toast The Lady of the House Society for the Ladies of the House Lo Que Hay Boyfriend Story Spontaneous Autobiographical Revelation Career Unformed Personality Disorder (UPD) Talking Pillow What Is Pleasure Bassfield Blue You Say It’s Hard to Join the Hours The Little Towns Hoist on One Shoulder Some Regrets that May Attend You When You Have Kicked the Seat of the Patron in Front of You at the Movie Theater Too Often Sporadic Gun Catalogue with Line from “Gerontion” Elegy FBI Story Status Sorcerers The Woman Who Works in the Medical Supply Store Is Strange. So Is a Detective. On Disencumbermentationalism FBI Story Ancestral Dentures Billet Doux To Lon Chaney in The Unknown Her Eyes Country of Songbirds Remarks You May Have Prepared for the Dinner Methods of Choice Young Benefactor An Attempt Bicycle Story Phenomenal Body Lots of Swearing at the Fairgrounds Bring the Greatest Food to the Greatest Humans A Last Stay The River Wants Grip Springtime Leisure Intercourse after Death Presents Special Difficulties What Happens to Women The Woman on Mexico Street Landscape after Going Testimony Second Elegy Bicycle Story Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

“Talking Pillow is as intimate as a dream. In mourning her losses, the poet turns them into a new morning of the imagination peopled by a beloved companion and a cast including agents from the TSA and the FBI, Lon Chaney, Robert Frost, a young benefactor, and the glorious ghost of Anna Akhmatova.”
—David Lehman


“Some poetry gives us a place to put away carefully what comes of living. All through Talking Pillow we get to know Angela Ball’s stories of life, love, death, passion, grief, stamina and perseverance; we get to know her passion for words, ‘faint patronymics of gaud’, and we get to understand what mysterious life can do. When she says something is like ‘swimming for the first time/underwater’, we feel how true that is, how good it can be to be understood.”
—Dara Wier
 

From the Publisher