A Film in Which I Play Everyone: Poems

Description

In these poems, Mary Jo Bang turns performance into a form of inquiry, building a “film” of shifting voices, selves, and perspectives that refuse to stay still. With a high-wire blend of lyric intensity and formal invention, the collection traces how identity is made—through language, memory, attention, and the stories we tell to survive. Across its vivid scenes and startling turns, the book explores themes of authorship, embodiment, and the ethics of looking, asking what it means to “play” another person without reducing them. Bang’s distinctive, image-driven style—sharp, musical, and intellectually alert—invites readers to experience poetry as both spectacle and witness, where every line becomes a new angle on the same human question.

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