Mary Jo Bang, Author . Grove $13 (96p) ISBN 978-0-8021-4157-6
"Art/ is the depth of whatever has deepened/ an abbreviate existence," writes Bang in this fourth collection, comprising ekphrastic poems that search relentlessly for the meaning of—and the reason for—art in our contemporary...
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Mary Jo Bang, Author . Graywolf $20 (92p) ISBN 978-1-55597-483-1
In her powerful fifth collection, Bang asks, “What is elegy but the attempt / To rebreathe life/ Into what the gone one once was.” Writing to mourn the death of her adult son, Bang interrogates the elegiac form and demands of it more...
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Mary Jo Bang, Author . Graywolf $22 (90p) ISBN 978-1-55597-539-5
In her follow-up to the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Elegy
, Bang is up to some of her old tricks again, but the previous collection's tour of a loss-inflected world has also taught her some new ones. The book takes the...
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Mary Jo Bang, Author Grove Press $13 (80p) ISBN 978-0-8021-3760-9
This is not a book about silent screen star Louise Brooks, despite her photo on the book's cover, seeming references to the notoriously alcoholic Brooks's many lost weekends, and persistent echoes of the 1920s throughout. Bang's (Apology for Want) ""
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Mary Jo Bang, Author University Press of New England $13.95 (80p) ISBN 978-0-87451-822-1
There is a hush to this collection, winner of the 1996 Bakeless Prize for first books of poetry sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Bang asserts that ""want"" is insistently silent and always on the verge of being articulated. But,...
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Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf (FSG, dist.), $16 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-1-55597-704-7
The impressive and challenging Bang, winner of the 2007 NBCC Award for Elegy, has never been accused of optimism, but this powerful, caustic set of lyrical and antilyrical works might be her harshest collection yet. Bang rebukes herself and her...
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Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, $16 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-1-55597-781-8
Bang (The Last Two Seconds) draws inspiration from the Bauhaus movement in this book-length sequence of prose poems. The Bauhaus School was a locus of early 20th-century high modernism, particularly its stark geometric architectural designs. Bang’s...
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Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, $17 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-64445-247-9
Bang’s cinematic ninth collection (after A Doll for Throwing) takes a tour of lived experience through a capricious lens that superpositions the familiar and the uncanny. With skillful introspection, she reflects on humanity’s selective hearing—“Who
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