This Afterlife is A. E. Stallings’s new Selected Poems, drawing on her four full-length books, and including a “lagniappe” or bonus of previously uncollected poems and translations. Stallings, a poet who was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, has made Athens, Greece, her home for almost two decades. Her education in Classics, Latin, and Greek prepared her for a life preoccupied with the Grecian peninsula, but the move was not preordained—it’s rather as if her work over the years led her there, from her debut collection Archaic Smile, a book of rewritings of myths and riffs on sayings, her second book Hapax, her translations of Lucretius and Hesiod and George Seferis, on through her third book, Olives, and her fourth, the Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Like, which begins with an epigraph in Greek and a poem that responds to it. That the poem is a villanelle tells us on the one hand that she is a poet whose strongest work often emerges out of inherited forms, and that her sensibility was European before she herself knew it was—the poem recalls that journey in the slow boil of the villanelle, building, and recasting: