Echo

A.E. Stallings

What tales we tell what talesWhat ails?
About the girls gone quietYet
The story-telling ones once
Who entertained the heartart
Till suddenly they ceased.eased
What makes the tongue inert?hurt.
What turns the voice to swordsWords,
Cutting the throat? What takesaches,
The name from the alibiI
Of the body? We were stern:turn
Stories, we said, are lies,ice,
We told her, don’t repeat them.eat them.

Feature Date

April 18, 2019

Series

Selected By

Share This Poem

Print This Poem

Featured Poet

A. E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She has recently published a new verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Penguin Classics), and a new collection of poetry, Like (with FSG).

Featured Translator

Buy This Book

The Sewanee Review

Spring 2019

Sewanee, Tennessee

University of the South

Editor
Adam Ross

Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith

Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite

Featured journal

Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.

Poetry Daily Depends on You

With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.