Mary Jo Bang (Credit: Mark Shäfer)

Mary Jo Bang, director of Washington University’s creative writing program, won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her last poetry collection, “Elegy.”

At 8 p.m. Thursday she’ll read from her latest book, “The Bride of E.” The reading and signing is in Hurst Lounge, Dunker 201. For more info: 314-935-7130.

Publishers Weekly gave the poetry collection a starred review, saying it “bridges a gap between an experimental tradition in American poetry and an older high lyric tradition. This is some of Bang’s best writing, and one of the most exciting books of the year.”

Here is a review for the Post-Dispatch by poet Aaron Belz:

By Aaron Belz/Special to the Post-Dispatch

Poetry by Mary Jo Bang
Published by Graywolf Press, 96 pages, $22 (hardcover)

If Mary Jo Bang hadn’t yet mastered the art of poetic montage, she’s nailed it in “The Bride of E.” Aside from the book’s alphabetical table of contents and its division into two “parts,” there is no apparent attempt to organize the poems’ subject matter.  Even within each poem, arbitrariness reigns in the form of spliced-together images of college parties, quotations from film and television, highbrow literary references, descriptions of furniture, and much more.

Symbolizing Bang’s approach might be the bird in the poem “N As In Nevermore”–Poe’s raven, now stuffed and photographed, its words misremembered. “One way to see the bird is to look at it,” she writes, “As a fragment of violence mixing its message / With the cold roar of constant utterance.” This is one of many cues that we are to read this poetry not as story but as documentation of the slippage inherent in the information age, in which Poe’s famous poem has its own Wikipedia entry.

So the book is a philosophical statement. Bang’s world, hyperlinked and mediated, often juxtaposes “real” images, which appear in traditional poetry as beautiful or romantic, against images of information technology. And just as often, Bang invokes an underlying moral reality. The poem “K As In F Blank Blank K” concludes: “Someone whispers, You / Are surrounded by evil… // At that, we can see / The art of the act of the moon / And the earth matching up on plasma screen.”

Often Bang directly references philosophy. “P Equals Pie” begins with the lines, “Let’s place Plato on one side. / Let’s place Pee-Wee Herman on the other.” This is an unequal pairing, its irony not so subtle. In the next two lines Bang explicitly identifies the source of the unfortunate irony: “It’s worth noting the Greek root, Tekno, / Means know-how. This is not the same // as practical wisdom…”

This is not to say that The Bride of E is entirely philosophical. It is also a lament, at times very personal and moving. Though the poems do cut from reference to reference, high and low, academic and popular, there is a voice connecting those references that is full of woe.

“This thought leads straight / To the darkest thought: I miss home. / Like a child misses home, or / A line drawing of a Quebec Marmot.” The voice is ours. It captures the hollow feeling we have as we click from webpage to webpage, or as we sort through spam, read text messages on our cell phones.
But Bang resolves the collection on a relatively hopeful note with
five prose poems that blend imagery and syntax in a less jarring way.

Perhaps by sheer insistence, by forcing our frenetic, ADHD lives into prose, we can see them as continuous and meaningful. And perhaps by reading this artful portrayal of a world full of minutia, readers will be moved to embrace a slower, more deliberate way of life.

Aaron Belz’s second book of poetry, “Lovely, Raspberry,” will be published in April.