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These difficult, allusive poems won the 1996 Bakeless Prize, awarded by Middlebury College and the publisher for a first book by an emerging writer. Intelligent yet insular, the title poem makes a case for art as the attempted fulfillment of spiritual desire, distinguishable from animal desire in that it can never be satisfied. There are strains of John Ashberry in the chord changes here: "I know I stand for too long, gazing/ with wistful face at the muted tints of objects/ on shelves. How smart we are all getting." Part 2 (there are four parts) escapes from the self-referential world of poems about poetry into the operating room, where the narrator, presumably a doctor or medical student, lances the abcess on an addict's arm. And it is here that the book comes to life; the next poem uses punning wordplay to transform an observed open-heart surgery into a brilliant gloss on the human condition. Several scholarly endnotes emphasize the author's interest in words and their derivations: "And things can be borrowed:/ gift comes from geve, loanword from land/ of finger-fringes coast?cold, hospitable/ means act of bounty, new owner." Interesting, with occasional flashes of brilliance; for larger poetry collections.—Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York, Library Journal
Winner of the 1996 Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for Poetry
Desire, its essence and its effect, informs Apology for Want. With precise language and evocative metaphor, Mary Jo Bang convinces us of our "always ravenous hunger." Employing penetrating images, she explicates the consequences of our dogged wanting. We cannot extricate ourselves from this cycle of desire and regret, nor should we choose to, as Bang reminds us in "Cafe Edgar," the powerful final poem in this collection.
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Reviews:
Here is a chronicle of scars from touch delivered or from touch withheld. Never weakened by self-pity, these are the poems of a shrewd clinician making the psychological rounds, and their feminism is the more powerful for being implicit.... —The New Yorker
Endorsements:
“‘Who wouldn’t have grown into longing?’ Mary Jo Bang asks in her startling first book. In the country of these poems desire is the initiating subject and words are the coinage of the realm. ‘Why indelible hunger?’ she asks, ‘Why insatiable need?’ To address—to encounter—these questions this poet has created her own stealthy syntax of the heart’s expansions and contractions, its resistance and leave-takings, its oracular warnings and necessary returns. Apology for Want is, among other things, both an apology and an apologia for desire. It is dark, inventive, and unabashed.”—Edward Hirsch
Intent on what remains when ‘loss is what you live with,’ Mary Jo Bang’s poems are fastidious exorcisms, though their message is stringent: ‘to grasp with wet hands the cold / metal of life, then find a way to let go.’ This is a new resonance, tough, wounded, vigilant, and I am enthralled by its powers.” —Richard Howard
From the Book:
want appropriates us,
sends us out dressed in ragged tulle,
but won't tell
where it last buried the acorn or bone.
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Awards/Recognition:
- Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for Poetry 1996
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Mary Jo Bang grew up in St. Louis and was educated at Northwestern University, Westminster University (London), and Columbia University. In 1995, she received a "Discovery"/The Nation award. She is poetry co-editor at the Boston Review.
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