Apology for Want by Mary Jo Bang

Apology for Want Reviews

• 
  Steven Godin

  
  THE CLAIRVOYANT
  
  Whose face doesn't fall? Cruel mockery
  of mask and hide of night clay.
  
  The once-beautiful woman waits
  at the window, vaguely tracing
  
  the patterned brocade's jacquard weave.
  Who wouldn't rather
  
  recall the lines of a lover's long hair?
  I wet the ends with my tongue once.
  
  In Italy, Siena perhaps, I stood in a narrow
  stairwell, fear pressed against stone.
  
  Nowhere to go except back.
  I felt a man's ribs in their cage.
  
  He didn't mind. If we owe each other
  anything, it's a small degree of intimacy.
  
  I've been a coward most of my life,
  nothing unusual.
  
  Whoever argues this has never asked
  her own heart what it is to be.
  
  I know the truth: my face giving way, lines
  becoming furrows in a bed of tilled earth.
  
  
  I am the earth, quartz-fret and sparks of salt.
  I will be pressed against. Known.
• 
  Eunice (nerdytalksbookblog)

  Mary Jo Bang is a known poet for quite sometime already, and it is only in 2016 that I have learned about her. Apology For Want had a melancholic tone to it, something you could not simply miss, but also it had assertiveness . It was a perfect mixture of push and pull, of gentleness and aggressiveness, of longing and wanting. It was something that you would go back to over and over, for each poem takes on a different meaning every time you encounter them.
  Here is a favorite poem from this collection:
  
  Autopsy
  
  How bare the soul – unmasked, deveined,
  picked clean. How smooth the flesh
  in death. Someone has arrived
  to wash the dust away. Mulberry stains.
  Indelible marks in hidden places.
  Look at you. No longer resisting, unfolding
  with ease; revealing scars
  from wounds that were slow to heal.
  The body remembers. You never won
  but dearly battled. The sky here
  is streaked with tile.
  The scientific community
  and the mildly curious have all come
  to watch. You bloom in this forest of white.
• 
  Michael

  From Apology for Want by Mary Jo Bang:
  
  Putting Down a Cat
  
  
  Death is more brutish than I expected.
  Was this to whom I sent those love notes
  when I was nine?
  
  He hectors the doctor with the blue syringe,
  the assistant in white.
  His breath is a mix of narcissus
  
  and nightshade; tainted eyes
  catch the burnish of fluorescent bulbs.
  He's not at all like a father
  
  in sepia photographs: rakish mustache,
  pleated wool trousers.
  To think I had always imagined him
  
  as someone from nighttime television
  who reunites those twins separated at birth
  and now forever marred
  
  by what they missed. The cat is no longer.
  Her body sheds its unused breath;
  a muscle twitches in objection.
  
  Nothing now can be undone. Any moment
  the door will open; our lives will insist,
  then come in.
  
  Death licks the cat's face, smoothes her fur,
  hands her back—
  a hand warmed thing, improbably.
• 
  Molly

  My favorite Mary Jo Bang thus far.
  
  (3.5)
• 
  Vincent Scarpa

  “I do not need
  to tell you there is love that outlasts
  an untender beginning. I cannot, nor would I
  give back what’s been given.” — “Twilight Amnesia”
• 
  Scribblescribe

  A wonderful book of poetry. Certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but beautiful throughout. Existential, nihilistic, lyrical, and then, a surprise…love.