POET

Mary Jo Bang (1946 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Mary Jo Bang is an acclaimed poet whose first collection, Apology for Want, received the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize for first book of poetry in 1996. Her other works include Louise in Love and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans.

"There is a quiet anarchy in the spare poems" of Apology for Want, wrote Susan Conley in Ploughshares. Conley noted that the subject matter of the work is culturally American, "one of shopping malls and consumption. . . . But the voice is subversive and unsettling, the syntax wholly unique and invented for the dark ephemeral region of longing this book inhabits." "Her poems are a route to a new way of looking at what we've grown into," argued Frank Allen in the American Book Review, "'the longing' that restores us to what we once 'hoped' to be."

Many critics were enthusiastic in their response to the collection. Allen found Bang's imagery "filled with beautiful, difficult thought." Ellen Kaufman in Library Journal called the collection "difficult, [and] allusive," arguing that Apology for Want is "interesting, with occasional flashes of brilliance." A Publishers Weekly critic lauded the "nice tension between the clarity of form and the open-endedness of Bang's articulated emotion." Conley concluded that the poems leave the reader "slightly stunned each time by their impact and exactitude—daring to ask the very largest of questions."

CAREER

Poetry editor, Boston Review; Washington University, St. Louis, MO, assistant professor of English.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

Apology for Want, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1997.
Louise in Love, Grove (New York, NY), 2001.
The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2001.

Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including New Republic, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Volt, Paris Review, New Yorker, and New American Writing. Bang's poetry has also been represented in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry, 2001.