{"title":"Mary Jo Bang","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the evocative and deeply intelligent poetry of Mary Jo Bang. Her work blends classical allusions with a strikingly modern sensibility, perfect for readers seeking profound emotional and intellectual engagement.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"film-in-which-i-play-everyone-book-mary-jo-bang-9781644452479","title":"A Film in Which I Play Everyone","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Film in Which I Play Everyone\u003c\/i\u003e takes its title from a response David Bowie gave to a fan who asked if he had upcoming film roles. \"I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized autobiography that I am writing,\" Bowie answered. \"Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Mary Jo Bang's brilliant poems might be the soundtrack to such a movie, where the first-person speaker plays herself and everyone she's ever met. She falls in and out of love with men, with women, and struggles to realize her ambitions while suffering crushing losses that give rise to dark thoughts. She's drawn to stories that mirror her own condition: those of women who struggle to speak in a world that would silence them. Embedded in these poems are those minor events that inexplicably persist in the memory and become placeholders: the time she lied and had her mouth washed out with soap; the time someone said she wasn't his \"original idea of beauty but something. \/ Something he couldn't quite \/\/ put his hands on\"; the time she stood in indifferent moonlight on a pier as a cat lapped at the water. 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Him, with his boredom and drink. I look back now and see buildings so thick that the life I thought I was making then is nothing but interlocking angles and above them, that blot of gray sky I sometimes saw. Underneath is the edge of what wasn't known then. When I would go. When I would come back. What I would be when.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e--from One Glass Negative\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Doll for Throwing\u003c\/i\u003e takes its title from the Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher's \u003ci\u003eWurfpuppe\u003c\/i\u003e, a flexible and durable woven doll that, if thrown, would land with grace. A ventriloquist is also said to throw her voice into a doll that rests on the knee. Mary Jo Bang's prose poems in this fascinating book create a speaker who had been a part of the Bauhaus school in Germany a century ago and who had also seen the school's collapse when it was shut by the Nazis in 1933. Since this speaker is not a person but only a construct, she is also equally alive in the present and gives voice to the conditions of both time periods: nostalgia, xenophobia, and political extremism. The life of the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy echoes across these poems--the end of her marriage, the loss of her negatives, and her effort to continue to make work and be known for having made it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49871935865105,"sku":"CIN1555977812G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50068011876625,"sku":"GOR013851492","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50134926917905,"sku":"CIN1555977812VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1555977812.jpg?v=1751119133"},{"product_id":"last-two-seconds-book-mary-jo-bang-9781555977047","title":"The Last Two Seconds","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe eagerly awaited new poetry collection by Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eWe were told that the cloud cover was a blanket\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eabout to settle into the shape of the present\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003ewhich, if we wanted to imagine it\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eas a person, would undoubtedly look startled--\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eas after a verbal berating\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eor in advance of a light pistol whipping.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe camera came and went, came and went,\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003elike a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe crew was acting like a litter of mimics\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003etrying to make a killing.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eAnything to fill the vacuum of time.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e --from \"The Doomsday Clock\"\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Last Two Seconds\u003c\/i\u003e is an astonishing confrontation with time--our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. 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In her world, anything goes, provided it is breathtaking. Bang, whose first collection was the prize-winning Apology for Want, both parodies and pays homage to the lyric tradition, borrowing its lush music and dramatic structure to give new voice to the old concerns of the late Romantic poets. Louise in Love is a dramatic postmodern verse-novel with an eloquent free-floating narration. The poems, rife with literary allusion, take journeys to distant lands. 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The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50278604144913,"sku":"CIN0802141579G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007269929233,"sku":"NIN9780802141576","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52148534051089,"sku":"NLS9780802141576","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0802141579.jpg?v=1750979118"},{"product_id":"elegy-book-mary-jo-bang-9781555974831","title":"Elegy","description":"\u003cp\u003eMary Jo Bang's fifth collection, \u003ci\u003eElegy\u003c\/i\u003e, chronicles the year following the death of her son. 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Timeless yet tirelessly inventive, Bang fashions her examination of the lived life into an abecedarius that is as rapturous in its language and music as it is affecting in its awareness of--and yearning for--what isn't there. The title of the first poem, \"ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness Is the Bride of Existence,\" posits the collection's central problem, and a symposium of figures from every register of our culture (from Plato to Pee-wee Herman, Mickey Mouse to Sartre) is assembled to help confront it. 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In \u003ci\u003ePurgatorio\u003c\/i\u003e, still guided by the Roman poet Virgil, Dante emerges from the horrors of Hell to begin the climb up Mount Purgatory, a seven-terrace mountain with each level devoted to those atoning for one of the seven deadly sins. At the summit, we find the Terrestrial Heaven and Beatrice--who will take over for Virgil, who, as a pagan, can only take Dante so far. During the climb, we are introduced to the myriad ways in which humans destroy the social fabric through pride, envy, and vindictive anger.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In her signature lyric style, accompanied by her wise and exuberant notes, Bang has produced a stunning translation of this fourteenth-century text, rich with references that span time, languages, and cultures. The contemporary allusions echo the audacious character of the original, and slyly insist that whatever was true in Dante's era is still true. 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In \u003ci\u003eParadiso\u003c\/i\u003e, Dante has been purified by his climb up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, and now, led by the luminous Beatrice, he begins his ascent through the nine celestial spheres of heaven toward the Empyrean, the mind of God. Along the way, we meet the souls of the blessed--those at various proximities to God, but all existing within the bliss of heaven's perfect order. Philosophically rich, spiritually resonant, \u003ci\u003eParadiso\u003c\/i\u003e is a reckoning with justice and morality from a time of ethical questioning and political division much like our own.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Bang's translation is a revelation in its artistry, readability, and faithfulness to Dante's ambition for an epic poem that dares to employ language and references recognizable to its readers. 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