Alicia Elsbeth Stallings Biography
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born 1968) is an American poet and translator. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Stallings was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia and studied classics at the University of Georgia (A.B., 1990) and University of Oxford. She is an editor with the Atlanta Review. In 1999, Stallings moved to Athens, Greece and has lived there ever since. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Athens Centre and is married to John Psaropoulos, who is the editor of the Athens News.
Stallings' poetry uses traditional forms, and she has been associated with the New Formalism, although her approach to formal verse is flexible, and she freely uses metrical substitution.
She is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to Poetry magazine. She has published three books of original verse, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), and Olives (2012). In 2007 she published a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things).
Looking back, it's something I've always had:
As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator
I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,
Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I'd slip through,
...
Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
...
The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
...
The mistake was light and easy in my hand,
A seed meant to be borne upon the wind.
I did not have to bury it or throw,
...
Sleep, she will not linger:
She turns her moon-cold shoulder.
With no ring on her finger,
You cannot hope to hold her.
...
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