The Last Two Seconds: Poems
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
The eagerly awaited new poetry collection by Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket
about to settle into the shape of the present
which, if we wanted to imagine it
as a person, would undoubtedly look startled—
as after a verbal berating
or in advance of a light pistol whipping.
The camera came and went, came and went,
like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.
The crew was acting like a litter of mimics
trying to make a killing.
Anything to fill the vacuum of time.
—from "The Doomsday Clock"
The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.
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Mary Jo Bang. (2015). The Last Two Seconds: Poems. Graywolf Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Mary Jo Bang. 2015. The Last Two Seconds: Poems. Graywolf Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Mary Jo Bang, The Last Two Seconds: Poems. Graywolf Press, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Mary Jo Bang. The Last Two Seconds: Poems. Graywolf Press, 2015.
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Mary Jo Bang is the author of six previous books of poetry, including Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also published a celebrated translation of Dante's Inferno. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
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The eagerly awaited new poetry collection by Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket
about to settle into the shape of the present
which, if we wanted to imagine it
as a person, would undoubtedly look startled—
as after a verbal berating
or in advance of a light pistol whipping.
The camera came and went, came and went,
like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.
The crew was acting like a litter of mimics
trying to make a killing.
Anything to fill the vacuum of time.
—from "The Doomsday Clock"
The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by...- isOwnedByCollections
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The eagerly awaited new poetry collection by Mary Jo Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket
about to settle into the shape of the present
which, if we wanted to imagine it
as a person, would undoubtedly look startled—
as after a verbal berating
or in advance of a light pistol whipping.
The camera came and went, came and went,
like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.
The crew was acting like a litter of mimics
trying to make a killing.
Anything to fill the vacuum of time.
—from "The Doomsday Clock"
The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time—our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.- sortTitle
- Last Two Seconds Poems
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- source: Publishers Weekly, starred review
- content:
"Bang addresses sources of doom that are not our fault (mortality) and those that are (climate change); her pessimistic conclusion draws on cultural lodestones from Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin and Cyndi Lauper. Attentive readers who delve into Bang's sharply articulated vision will find them unforgiving indeed--and those same readers will praise her to the skies."
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- source: The New York Times Book Review on Mary Jo Bang
- content: "Bang can be an ingenious phrase maker, startling English out of its idiomatic slumber with subtle, deliberate awkwardness."
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- source: Publishers Weekly, starred review on Mary Jo Bang
- content: "[Bang's work] bridges a gap between an experimental tradition in American poetry and an older high lyric tradition."
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Starred review from January 19, 2015
The impressive and challenging Bang, winner of the 2007 NBCC Award for Elegy, has never been accused of optimism, but this powerful, caustic set of lyrical and antilyrical works might be her harshest collection yet. Bang rebukes herself and her readers, dresses down civilization, takes on species extinction, militarism, and bodily decay while warning us—in as many ways as the language can bear—that the end of everything is near. A map is “an empire/ of uncommon horror: the human speaking:/ ‘Every moment all that matters is me.’ ” Thought won’t help: in the title poem, “he mind/ isn’t everything, only a gray-suited troop of mechanics/ working to ratchet the self through the teeth of a wheel.” Animals, species, ways of life die off: “very last scene lasts for no more/ than a second; some ceramic panther/ stands in for the extinct. Is it today yet?” Bang addresses sources of doom that are not our fault (mortality) and those that are (climate change); her pessimistic conclusion draws on cultural lodestones from Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin and Cyndi Lauper. Attentive readers who delve into Bang’s sharply articulated vision will find them unforgiving indeed—and those same readers will praise her to the skies.
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March 15, 2015
"I'm sick of explanations," says Bang in her viscerally smart new book, and throughout we get an astonishing sense of how transparent the world isn't. The truth is declared intangible, historical events "exchange glances with nothingness," and "The Storm We Call Progress" presents a dog with "her back to the future, her last supper simply becoming/ the bowels' dissolving memory in a heap before her." Not that Bang's poetry settles into a wishy-washy, let's-enjoy-the-moment kind of thing. These are poems that really make you think. In "Wall Street," what's the link between a trapeze artist whirling on a bar and a banker who says, "I'm certain God wishes me well"? The supreme self-sureness it takes to perform. "A life is like Russell said/ of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave," declares Bang, and sometimes as she examines our on-again, off-again flickerings the connections seem remote and the poems sandpapery as a result. But Bang's workout, invested with increasingly emotional resonance as the book unfolds, is bracing. VERDICT Bang, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Elegy, sets herself and her readers a fresh challenge with each new poem here, which makes this a satisfying work for poetry fans.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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March 15, 2015
Time, war, fundamentalism, surveillance, and the drastic consequences of our desires ( We call what we want what we need ) all come under scrutiny in National Book Critic Circle Awardwinner Bang's (The Bride of E., 2009) seventh collection, which begins with an earthquake, a cockroach, and a man who looked a lot like Kafka. Bang's energetic yet intricately freighted poems are fueled by her immersions in literature, art, science, and music, some sources acknowledged, others the subtlest of allusions. All Through the Night is clearly a driving tribute to the courageous Russian activist punk rockers, Pussy Riot, while you have to read Bang's Notes to know that Let's Say Yes is composed of words found in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The collaged and jostling complexity Bang ingeniously creates yields disquieting and enigmatic images ( A sea of blood / moves back and forth to a song of no mercy ) and riddles ( the ordinary useless / shapes of the nonchalant ). These are edgy, erudite, daring poems that counter oppression, complacency, and despair with sharp intent, contortionist reasoning, subversive intelligence, and torqued, insistent beauty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
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