Description:
Included in LitHub's Most Anticipated Poetry of 2026
Steeplechase explores multiple landscapes, including Mississippi and its many church steeples; countries known and unknown; cities and inhabitants both aspirational and lost. Its voice is humorous, bewildered, disillusioned, hopeful. The book's temporal setting is the two years of extra life granted a partner after catastrophic illness and surgery: love's last compelling season.
Review Quotes: Beginning with the first few words of Steeplechase, 'Not mine but I'll take some-- / not too much, ' you can be sure Angela Ball will engage you with care, with wit, with every magical thing a poem can do. Her way forward always includes a few back and forth and sideways steps. She offers us 'Belief / that no knowledge is permanent / or impossible.' If it's an autobiography you want, if it's biography, if it's how to grieve, if it's romance, you will find it in Ball's Steeplechase. You will also find yourself smack dab in the middle of poetry unlike any other, with 'play kisses that are real, ' and where smiles can be camouflage, and a steeple may be raised high up to show the faithful the way to church. I love to give a book like this to a friend, to read it with me, to keep it close by.--Dara Barrois/Dixon, author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina