The Last Two Seconds: Poems by Mary Jo Bang

The Last Two Seconds: Poems Reviews

• 
  Peycho Kanev

  ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
  
  The rotational earth, the resting for seconds:
  hemisphere one meets hemisphere two,
  thoughts twist apart at the center seam.
  Everything inside is.
  Cyndi Lauper and I both fall into pure emptiness.
  That’s one way to think: I think I am right now.
  We have no past we won’t reach back—
  The clock ticks like the nails of a foiled dog
  chasing a faster rabbit across a glass expanse.
  A wheel of fortune spins on its side,
  stops and starts. The stopped time
  is no longer time, only an illusion that says,
  I can have this, and this, and this.
  Cyndi says nothing works like that.
  There is no all-purpose plastic totem
  that acts like a bouncer holding back the fact
  that at least once a day you look up:
  it’s the self you kept in a suitcase holding the key,
  coming to meet you, every cell a node
  in a network of ongoing doubling. Cyndi says
  the world expands but always keeps us in it.
  For every you, there’s a riot grrrl in prison
  in Putin’s Russia. You know the self dissolves
  and when it does—no figure, all ground,
  like a surface seen microscopically—
  you fill the frame and explode,
  a rubber-wound inside unraveling and becoming
  a measurement of whatever exits. It’s like sleep,
  if sleep were a film that didn’t include you, but no,
  whatever is happening, you are always in it,
  the indispensable point of view.
  Proof of that is that a lift force brings you back
  and you wake, back to your face, hands, mirror
  image in the bed next to you, Ketamine moment
  where kinesthesia is secondary to everything
  is possible: you and you and you and now and
  you and yes and you with the night-self singing
  backup. Onstage, the fractured future of a world
  which is the world with the scaffolding folded
  and laid on top of this night. All through it.
  Until it ends or else begins again. Meanwhile,
  that indefatigable wavering between
  what you want and what you get for wanting.
  
  A TECHNICAL DRAWING OF THE MOMENT
  
  Before the monument becomes remote
  and unapproachable, a made-up anecdote
  of easy adoration, pressed into marble
  or a more modern plastic, let’s ask ourselves,
  What is myth? And further, is it better
  to dispel or debunk one, or instead
  should we embrace the petty mechanistic
  hope that invents it? Are we not ridiculous,
  torn in two between the true
  and what we’d so like to believe is true?
  It’s exactly there, right where we keep our wishes,
  that our fake animals act as a code
  for what we think of as enlightenment. There,
  a tiger’s faux hide pretends to be a pelt that says,
  This was my life. And so it was,
  since a symbol is nothing but an illustration
  of obsession, concern, focus, and an atlas
  of where one wishes to have been
  or fears one someday will go.
  Color can add detail to the expanse between
  the short but bright beginning of an era
  and a mottled much longer after.
  History moves in under the glass-top
  where from a safe distance we can watch it
  become our keeper and contentious tormenter.
  I admit to being frightened, or better,
  ill at ease, with what I don’t know but can see:
  the instinct for power that some people have.
• 
  Cara

  I've only recently started to really start reading poetry, and I absolutely love the raw imagery and moments of self reflection. "Death without life. Terror. Fear. Disaster. / Punishment. Profound darkness. Evening./ She walked to the window: sky,/ clouds coming into the room./ How odd, she thought, to be. " I'm not quite sure I understand all of this, but I do know I would love to read any more of her work.
• 
  Superstition Review

  This book is a wild ride. Mary Jo Bang creates off-the-wall images and is at times cynical of our presence on earth. “…the buildings teetering before falling / the way ideologies might sway back and forth / as if they were preserved in a glass tower / that was about to be toppled.” However, the book has its moments of vulnerability and inward reflection such as, “I think that chaos fascinates me. I say, / I am a part of that, one of the characters in the cage.” Mary Jo Bang dabbles in varied form and the book even consists of a few prose poems. She also draws from literary and historical figures such as Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Cleopatra. This book of poetry is a vision of cynical chaos and the resonance is not far from, “The descent of small-town darkness.”
  
  Review by Bradly Brandt
• 
  Rosemary

  This was just not my kind of poetry. She has a great eye for images and ear for language; her poetry is carefully constructed and never cliche. But it leaves me absolutely cold. Nothing here for me to hold onto.
  
  I dislike the way she weaves together multiple images instead of focusing on one central one. Sometimes I have read this done in a compelling way, but not here, unfortunately. It came across as disjointed rather than as cohesive.
  
  She clearly knows what she is doing but I just could not enjoy these. Too bad; I loved her Inferno translation and was hoping she would be a new favorite of mine!
• 
  Angela Lim

  3.5 stars
  
  If you're looking for heartwarming and hopeful poetry to distract you from doomsday and the looming collapse of the world... this collection is not for you. Throughout this book, Bang makes heavy use of sentence fragments and repetition, creating a list of anxiety-inducing aspects of the world and creating a sense that we are just moving through our lives, talking and noticing, but ultimately not having a long-lasting impact that can salvage our planet and society. Still, I think this was an important collection for me to read, as it forces me to think of my life and my own poetry on a larger scope.
  
  Through these poems, Bang elicited the fact that poems, ultimately cannot alter the world, and yet it seems to be all that she can offer. Even though I romanticize the notion of poetry and think it's something that everyone should take time to pursue, I cannot believe that a poem or the best piece of writing is miraculous enough to save the world and change the entire trajectory of humankind. At its best, writing can only nudge or jumpstart a conversation. Is that enough to aim for, or should writing be doing more?
  
  I am reminded of an E.E. Cummings poem, humanity i love you, in which Cummings laments that humans are writing poems in the face of death, as if the words have salvific power. After reading The Last Two Minutes I'm left wondering what more we can do with our lives rather than simply observe and record. We must admit, confess, and act or else our lives are empty.
  
  My two favorite poems from this collection were The Too-Bright Light Will Wash You Out and Two Frames. From the latter:
  
  "You found yourself wishing
  again (didn't you?) for some Polaroid moment
  of the past when girls always sunned under umbrellas
  
  and mascara stayed where you wanted it to. I can tell you that
  will never happen again. We're post-postmodern—in the city,
  anyway. We know where we are going and it isn't back and forth.
  We want and light comes. We call what we want what we need."
• 
  Andromache

  "And now the question: what do we do with the longing
  for what can destroy us? You're free to think:
  logic can change even the most obstinate person; or
  
  even logic cannot change the most obstinate person."
  
  -from "The Earthquake in this Case Was"
  
  The collection is a tough nut to crack at the start, but Bang teaches you how to read her poems over the course of the first twenty pages. The narratives are dense and they don't seem to care too much if they're impenetrable at times--not unlike the Jorie Graham swagger, vacillating dangerously between mystery and elitism. But there are many transcendent moments and images in the book in the midst of the thick philosophical wool. The wool is frustrating, but it isn't necessarily bad.
• 
  Gabriel Clarke

  I struggled with this and (not for the first time) resented the tyranny of the rating system. Mary Jo Bang is a fantastically accomplished poet. I greatly admired her translation of the Inferno. But the fact is that this simply didn’t sing to me, at this point, in this place, and I’m at a loss as to how to explain why. So, 4 *. But I experienced it as a “3”.
• 
  Ace Boggess

  Beautiful lines. A few poems I thought were astounding. Overall, I just didn't connect with this book the way I hoped I would. Still, worth reading, and at no point did I feel an urge to give up. It was insightful enough that I'll pick up others of her books, though.
• 
  J

  I don't really have a review for this one. It's a really intelligent and thought-provoking collection of poems, but it was hard to get into the poems because I wasn't particularly taken to the style.
• 
  Vincent Scarpa

  “Darkness is only a relative
  index of many other aspects of the way light behaves.” — “Reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”
• 
  Theron Arnold

  3 1/2 stars.
• 
  Kathy Duffy

  I am a big Mary Oliver, Jo Harjoe and Nikki Giovanni fan....
• 
  some mushroom dude

  absolutely stylish & so very dreadful poems about the anxiety of automation. i watch a clock become my mind. there will be no stopping this empty terror
• 
  Robin

  Mary Jo Bang is absolutely talented and has well-deserved accolades. This collection is no different - with stunning images, interesting wordplay, and really powerful messages in compact spaces.
  
  However, it isn't necessarily my cup of tea. It gets very clinical and expansively intelligent - which I admire in a writer and like to be able to read since it's so unlike what I normally read. But at the end of the day, this kind of intellectual writing isn't my cup of tea. That isn't to say it isn't masterfully done and well-crafted - and I can appreciate it on a literary, craft level - but I tend to gravitate elsewhere.
  
  For what this collection is, it's very well done and certainly on a craft level deserving of five stars.
• 
  M- S__

  i struggled to rate this because i read it in a bit of a hurry, though maybe i was supposed to. the central focus of the collection seemed to be time: specifically how we're running out of it. much of the imagery folded neatly into this idea. some of the poems seemed acutely aware of what "absence" meant and employed interesting imagery to fill the vacancy. many of the poems, however, were just kind of there. as soon as i would get a foothold into them, they either ended or changed direction. i felt bang was at her best in the couple of pieces she broke into longer series.
• 
  John Tessitore

  I find this collection entirely opaque, and the end notes don't help. The problem here is syntax, the folding and refolding of thought. It's like reading a closed carpenter's ruler. Rhythm would help. Or a surprising turn of phrase. But the language here is peculiarly lifeless, as if to highlight the line of thought which, to my eye at least, is too crooked to be read with anything like pleasure or recognition.
• 
  Chris Drew

  This book was good, but not great. There are a few 'great' moments, it is consistently intelligent, funny, and subtle but never really transcends into something truly touching. It is very much in the style of late 20th century academic poetry... a little less difficult and overstuffed than something like Paul Muldoon, but in the same vein.
• 
  Amy

  I dislike this author's work intensely. I read Elegy and appreciated the subject matter, but this--along with everything else that I've tried--feels more like a vocabulary display than poetry, to me. I actually had to stop reading all together for a few days after I was through with this, just to clear my head.
• 
  Courtney LeBlanc

  Unfortunately I just didn't care for this collection of poems. I wanted to be pulled into them but none did that and I found myself drifting or skimming as I read. Just not the book of poetry for me I guess. =/
• 
  Lauren

  This collection just wasn't for me. I enjoyed the imagery and use of language as I was reading each poem, but it left me as soon as I started the next one.
• 
  Natalia Mujadzic

  Just to clarify...this collection is intelligently/eloquently written. However, it just wasn't the kind of poetry I enjoy reading.
• 
  Cade Miller

  What a pleasant rereading experience. Like almost all poetry collections, they are some poems in this collection that stand head and shoulders above the rest, preventing me from giving this a perfect rating. BUT I adore Mary Jo Bang's style, and I deeply admire her work and influences. This collection deserves four stars for "The Disappearance of Amerika: After Kafka" alone. A highly recommended read if you're looking for some memorable contemporary poetry with a very developed, individual style.
• 
  c h

  This collection is filled with heady, complex, and heavily stylized poems, which can intimidate on the one hand, but on the other hand, can enthrall. I was amazed at Mary Jo Bang's handling of language and imagery in even her most abstract or politically-minded poems. Part of what makes these poems work is their (usually) first-person, subjective narration, which grounds the reader in a human experience of abstract or political forces. See, for example, "Close Observation Especially of One Under Suspicion." I also loved her allusive poems, such as "The Earthquake She Slept Through," "Let's Say Yes," "The Disappearance of Amerika: After Kafka," and "The Blank of Reason Produces Blank: After Goya." Though each of these poems, and others, rely heavily on allusions to other works, Mary Jo Bang manages to transform their meanings, whether it be to make ordinary life uncanny or to suggest the political implications or resonances of the personal. I highly recommend this book, and might even re-read it myself, as it is quite complex.