A Film in Which I Play Everyone

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.)