Louise in Love

By Mary Jo Bang

Poems inspired by silent-film star Louise Brooks from the National Book Critics Award–winning author of Elegy and acclaimed translator of Dante’s Inferno.
 
In this stunning collection of poems, Mary Jo Bang jettisons the reader into the dreamlike world of Louise, a woman in love. With language delicate, smooth, and wryly funny, Louise is on a voyage without destination, traveling with a cast of enigmatic others, including her lover, Ham.
 
Louise is as musical as she is mysterious, and the reader is invited to listen. Bang, whose first collection was the prize-winning Apology for Want, both parodies and pays homage to the lyric tradition, borrowing its lush music and dramatic structure to give new voice to the old concerns of the late Romantic poets.
 
Louise in Love is a dramatic postmodern verse-novel. The poems, rife with literary allusion, take journeys to distant lands. And, like anyone on a voyage without a destination, they are endlessly questioning of the enigmatic world around them.
 
“One of the finest poets of her generation.” —Marjorie Perloff

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780802196569

Book preview

ECLIPSED

The crimped beige of a book, turned-down corner.

The way an eclipse begins with the moon

denting the sun’s liquid disk, taking a first bit

then more and more and. Leaving a regal rim, a dim

spared portion, a shiver. How cold she was

as the cloud covered the cuckoo-land,

birds batting the tree fringe. Fitful caprice.

Foolish, yes, they were, those birds, but clever too.

A nostrum of patterning rain had fallen

beforehand ceding the hibiscus buds bundled

and in disarray. In the news p. Nostradamic foretelling

of retinal damage written in novelese.

Wasn’t the skeptic invented to nourish an interest in