Mesmerizing, piercing, and remarkable, the poetry of Mary Jo Bang stuns readers with subtle lyric needles calculated to paralyze the psyche, divesting it of illusion with a bracing honesty that we must ultimately admire. With their severe knowledge often tumbling forth in tight tercets and hypnotic couplets, her poems formally echo the late work of Sylvia Plath though are smoother in content, more premeditated at their core. This poet refuses to become overwhelmed, at least until she has buried her dagger up to the hilt into the bottomless jaw of Want and informed us that, alas, not only is this beast indestructible but inescapable because we are human.

Her poems, including those in her first collection Apology for Want, seem to draw their complex lexical texture from mythology, philosophy, medicine, and an otherworldly source entirely the poet's own. Glittering here and there are also the assorted threads of an astounding life begun in an area outside of St. Louis once called "little dog patch." Since this inauspicious beginning, Bang has lived on both sides of the Atlantic, earned degrees in sociology, photography. and writing and received training in medicine. Her poems speak to us of "fish-fry's" and "scorched lawns," London morgues, Montana bordellos, and the intrigues of New York, where she currently lives and teaches. We are reminded that love is destructible, fragile, shifting perceptions continually shifting within a body that is "...Filament nerves swan-necked around blunt fingertips./A dorsal branch/ramified at the tender nail bed, every sinew and fiber held at wait and want."

Her work manages to be tender, paradoxical and irresistible. delivering harsh truths sotto voce. Incantatory without succumbing to mysticism, these poems do not placate with promises of transformation. Forget serenity, self-knowledge is better; the two cannot co-exist for long. Goddesses reign here, but Bang's oracles reach for stethoscopes, recite body parts with spell-binding authority are tough witty damsels who unabashedly admit "Night is when I give you new clothes. Suits you never owned, borrowed cuff links/rented ties, until you look nothing like/your former self." Her poems reveal to us, without apology, how incomplete we really are, no matter who we are or how much we have. Unexpectedly, they are comforting: no one is excluded and, because of this poet's deft skill and vision, the world becomes stranger and heartbreakingly beautiful.