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Angie Estes
Angie Estes is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City (Unbound Edition Press). Unbound will publish The Swallows Come Out: Selected Poems 1995-2025 in March 2026. Her previous book, Enchantée, won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, and Tryst was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Voice-Over, won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (GibbsSmith, 1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. Her seventh book of poems is forthcoming from Unbound Edition Press. A collection of essays devoted to Estes’s work appears in the University of Michigan Press “Under Discussion” series: The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes’s Poetry (2019).
The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has also received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. In 2023, she was a Writer-in-Residence Fellow at the James Merrill House.
Learn more about The Swallows Come Out: Selected Poems, 1995-2025
Praise for Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City
Estes’ latest collection of verse, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, will nudge you, as it did me, in the direction of awe.
The capacious mind and memory of these poems moves between Tintoretto, Cole Porter, Huck Finn, Dali, Faulkner, Michelangelo, and “When Your Lover Leaves You,” “her design / for Lady Macbeth’s dress: one thick red drip of blood sewn in from waist to floor.
Reading a poem by Angie Estes is like listening in on the intricate turnings and realizations of a brilliant mind, a mind that follows one path only to discover another more surprising one, a mind that observes with an acuteness and intelligence I can only envy. In Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, Estes is at the height of her power: erudite and intimate, playful and musical. But there is gravity here, as well, beneath the slipperiness of language — a sense of the profound presence of our cultural pasts, the seductiveness of image and language, the power of romantic longing, connection, and loss. I’ve admired Estes’ work for decades — and this may be my favorite of her books.
An electric intelligence courses through Angie Estes’ new poems. As soon as I opened the book I knew I was in for a ride. There’s a worldliness about the poems that gives them heft and authority, while simultaneously enhancing their intimacy, eroticism, and spontaneity. Linguistically playful (in several languages!), lively on the page, funny and unpredictable, these poems range through the worlds of art, music, politics, science, you name it, with a probing curiosity that’s irresistible. They also teach the reader how to read them, which is a quality I greatly admire, and which only great poetry possesses.
Angie Estes’ poems sing life most gloriously — the sensual and the sacred; art’s intensity and the earthly everyday; language, music and meaning. This beautiful collection, filled with wonders, exhilarates.
Moving between artistic/literary history and the perils of human desire, Angie Estes’ Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City achieves a vast poetic range and resonance: “Like Huck, I reckon I got to light out / for the Territory, out where you knew the way / to my house the way a blood clot / knows the way to a heart.” She’s one of the best poets of her generation, one whose diction operates at the highest and most complex level of tri-lingual improvisation. Her work “privileges [our] vocabulary.” Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City flashes perilously like “the dorsal fin of some / fin de siècle.”
