It’s rare to find a quiet poet who can read as compellingly as the noisy poets; the noisy poets will grab your attention with volume, and hopefully with the volume there’s something redeeming in the work itself. She read a piece called “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon,” based, I think, on a Guy Maddin film of a similar name. She was not noisy, but brilliantly focused, and every word she read had a gravity to it (unlike, ironically, balloons of any sort, even strange ones). Her work actually reminds me a lot of Maddin’s films - built in some silvery noir otherworld, full of images that are exotic but somehow familiar, pulled up straight from the unconscious.
She’s just come out with a new book, Elegy, which received raves from uber-poet Marjorie Perloff:
“The loss of a child—especially an only child who is in the prime of life—is one of the most painful experiences anyone can have and one, common sense tells us, almost impossible to render in an age of sensory overload. But Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy is the grand exception. In its insistence on “the inexhaustible / Need to be accurate,” Elegy is wholly absorbing. Avoiding all self-pity, false comfort, sentimentality or finger pointing, Bang’s terse, oblique poems anatomize grief, guilt, and mourning in pitiless detail. Do things ‘improve’ by the end of the year whose progress this heartbreaking book charts? Not really, but the reader is transformed. I know of no contemporary elegy that has its power.”
Currently the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University and poetry editor for The Boston Review, Mary Jo Bang comes to the 92nd Street Y for a reading on November 1 with Dean Young and submissions are still being accepted for the opportunity to take her Master Class on Saturday, November 3.
Stefene Russell of the 
