A film in which I play everyone Poems

Bang's riddling title, lifted from a witty remark by David Bowie, offers a clue to the cinematic nature of these sharp, surprising, intricately and infinitely intriguing poems. The camera's eye--zooming in and out, capturing enigmatic moments, odd angles, and puzzling juxtapositions--both supports and thwarts the speaker's attempts to reconcile with time. In mysterious scenarios, some culled from what our guide describes as "the chiaroscuro movie of my mind," startling insights are wrung from words, objects, and situations. Myths, literary allusions, dreams, the bible, physics, elegant obliqueness, and arresting directness all play in Bang's resonant metaphysical formulations. Bang is funny, surreal, inquisitive, incisive, and tough. Windows, mirrors, doors, curtains, a stage, space telescopes, storms, wildfires, "synaptic activity," psychotherapy, and psychedelics are all key elements. Here women are silenced; love is dashed. Bang offers crisp interpretations of what it is to be conscious and ourselves: "There is // no getting around the fact that each of us is / a world of our own." And of the perpetual struggle to survive: "A weight kept being set on top of the base of being."

Bang's cinematic ninth collection (after A Doll for Throwing) takes a tour of lived experience through a capricious lens that superpositions the familiar and the uncanny. With skillful introspection, she reflects on humanity's selective hearing--"Who listens to anyone anymore?/ The straight pin's a needle, no eye"--as well as the weight of inevitable loss: "In French, blessed is wounded. Shorthand: I am, therefore sorrow." Elsewhere, she considers love--"what is love but a form/ of trying to see in low-light conditions?"--and the sanctity of experiences, "I treated anything I could see,/ no matter how transient, as if it were/ a treasured possession, a gift from a friend// who practiced time-space travel--always/ forgetting what life was like on earth." Bang's scenes intermix allegory, surrealism, and metafiction, resulting in a pastiche of philosophical discourse and hypnotic symbolism ("The air burned// like a curtain on fire. The fire kept going out,/ then being relit, a trick candle on a cake made of clouds"). Wry and invigorating, this resonant collection mollifies the need for certainty. (Sept.)