[15] Her first book-length collection of poetry, Archaic Smile, was published in 1999 by Northwestern University Press and in 2022 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; it won the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award.
[17] Her third book-length collection, Olives, was published in 2012 with Northwestern; it was a finalist for that year's National Book Critics Circle Award.
"[18] In 2017, Stallings published a verse translation of Hesiod's Works and Days, including an introductory essay and endnotes, also with Penguin.
Classicist, critic, and poet Peter MacDonald characterized it as a "superb creation" and praised Stallings's "mastery of a characteristic voice" for Hesiod, while also noting the virtues of her "persuasively argued and brilliant Introduction".
[19] Stallings has also translated the Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, a parody of Homer widely regarded to be a Hellenistic epyllion, into rhyming iambic pentameters; accompanied by illustrations from Grant Silverstein, it was published by Paul Dry in 2019.
"[22] Poet Dana Gioia described Archaic Smile as "a debut of genuine distinction...Stallings displays extraordinary powers of invention and delight.
"[16] Able Muse, a formalist online poetry journal, noted that, "For all of Stallings' formal virtuosity, few of her poems are strictly metrically regular.
Indeed, one of the pleasant surprises of Archaic Smile is the number of superb poems in the gray zone between free and blank verse.
[25] Reviewing This Afterlife for the New York Times, poet and critic David Orr observed: "The main thing Stallings has going for her is that she’s good at writing poems.
'"[26] In its review of This Afterlife, The New Yorker wrote: "Stallings’s formal ingenuity lends a music to her philosophically and narratively compelling verse.
She draws inspiration from daily domestic life and from the mythology and history of Greece...crafting clever yet profound meditations on love, motherhood, language, and time.