Steeplechase: Poems

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 is professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she directs the Center for Writers. She is the author of five previous poetry collections: Kneeling Between Parked Cars, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, Possession, Quartet, and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. She is the recipient of an NEA grant and has twice won the Poetry Prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry, on the Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, and has been frequently anthologized.