Description
Poetry. In this accomplished first collection, Erica McAlpine draws truths from the everyday, meditating over contingency and luck and the often-vexed relationship we have to these things. The casual register of her verse belies its formal complexity. Many of the poems are crafted in tight syntactical units of just one or two sentences; others are composed in rhyming sapphics, a meter favoured by the poet Horace, whose guiding voice recurs throughout the collection. Humorous and serious in turn, these quietly virtuosic poems achieve lofty aims: to teach, to advise, to warn—to show, in the manner of a close friend, what the world has to offer, what it sometimes takes away, and what can and should matter most.
Author Bio
Erica McAlpine was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She studied English and Latin poetry as an undergraduate at Harvard before earning an MPhil in English from Cambridge and a PhD from Yale. Her poems have appeared in many magazines including The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, Parnassus, and Slate. She teaches English and American literature at Keble College, Oxford, where she lives with her husband and two children. THE COUNTRY GAMBLER (Shearsman Books, 2016) is her first book of poems.
Author City: OXFORD UNK