University of Pittsburgh Press
94 pages
February 4, 2026
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.
Angela Ball’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Poetry, Oxford American, The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, North American Review, The New Yorker, Field, Colorado Review, The New Republic, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Talking Pillow. The recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.