Published in 2007 (first published 2000)
87 pages
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher (Graywolf Press 2012), and Purgatorio (Graywolf Press 2021). Paradiso is forthcoming in 2025. She is the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi—forthcoming from Princeton University Press (the Lockert Poetry in Translation Series) in 2024. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
What is this book about?
“One of the finest poets of her generation.” —Marjorie Perloff
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.
