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.

Each poem is a kind of telephone indeed, connecting us—asking us to listen in on—a world equally full of mischief and love. The poems do to reality what breath does to a balloon, giving it new shape from the inside out.