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Apology for Want
Desire, its essence and its effect, informs Apology for Want. With precise language and evocative metaphor, Mary Jo Bang convinces us of our "always ravenous hunger." Employing penetrating images, she explicates the consequences of our dogged wanting. We cannot extricate ourselves from this cycle of desire and regret, nor should we choose to, as Bang reminds us in "Cafe Edgar," the powerful final poem in this collection.
- GenresPoetry
71 pages, Hardcover
First published July 15, 1997
2 people are currently reading
128 people want to read
About the author
Mary Jo Bang
38 books86 followersMary Jo Bang is an American poet. In her most recent collection, The Bride of E, she uses a distinctive mix of humor, directness, and indirection, to sound the deepest sort of anguish: the existential condition. Bang fashions her examination of the lived life into an abecedarius—the title of the first poem, "ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness Is the Bride of Existence," posits the collection's central problem, and a symposium of figures from every register of our culture (from Plato to Pee-wee Herman, Mickey Mouse to Sartre) is assembled to help confront it.
Bang is the author of five previous books of poetry: Apology for Want, Louise in Love, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon and Elegy, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was named a 2008 New York Times Notable Book. She’s been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, and a B.A. in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London. From 1995-2005 she was the poetry co-editor at Boston Review. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she is a Professor of English and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Washington University.
Bang is the author of five previous books of poetry: Apology for Want, Louise in Love, The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon and Elegy, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was named a 2008 New York Times Notable Book. She’s been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University, an M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Northwestern University, and a B.A. in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London. From 1995-2005 she was the poetry co-editor at Boston Review. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she is a Professor of English and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Washington University.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 29, 2020
THE CLAIRVOYANT
Whose face doesn't fall? Cruel mockery
of mask and hide of night clay.
The once-beautiful woman waits
at the window, vaguely tracing
the patterned brocade's jacquard weave.
Who wouldn't rather
recall the lines of a lover's long hair?
I wet the ends with my tongue once.
In Italy, Siena perhaps, I stood in a narrow
stairwell, fear pressed against stone.
Nowhere to go except back.
I felt a man's ribs in their cage.
He didn't mind. If we owe each other
anything, it's a small degree of intimacy.
I've been a coward most of my life,
nothing unusual.
Whoever argues this has never asked
her own heart what it is to be.
I know the truth: my face giving way, lines
becoming furrows in a bed of tilled earth.
I am the earth, quartz-fret and sparks of salt.
I will be pressed against. Known.
April 3, 2019
Mary Jo Bang is a known poet for quite sometime already, and it is only in 2016 that I have learned about her. Apology For Want had a melancholic tone to it, something you could not simply miss, but also it had assertiveness . It was a perfect mixture of push and pull, of gentleness and aggressiveness, of longing and wanting. It was something that you would go back to over and over, for each poem takes on a different meaning every time you encounter them.
Here is a favorite poem from this collection:
Autopsy
How bare the soul – unmasked, deveined,
picked clean. How smooth the flesh
in death. Someone has arrived
to wash the dust away. Mulberry stains.
Indelible marks in hidden places.
Look at you. No longer resisting, unfolding
with ease; revealing scars
from wounds that were slow to heal.
The body remembers. You never won
but dearly battled. The sky here
is streaked with tile.
The scientific community
and the mildly curious have all come
to watch. You bloom in this forest of white.
Here is a favorite poem from this collection:
Autopsy
How bare the soul – unmasked, deveined,
picked clean. How smooth the flesh
in death. Someone has arrived
to wash the dust away. Mulberry stains.
Indelible marks in hidden places.
Look at you. No longer resisting, unfolding
with ease; revealing scars
from wounds that were slow to heal.
The body remembers. You never won
but dearly battled. The sky here
is streaked with tile.
The scientific community
and the mildly curious have all come
to watch. You bloom in this forest of white.
February 28, 2011
From Apology for Want by Mary Jo Bang:
Putting Down a Cat
Death is more brutish than I expected.
Was this to whom I sent those love notes
when I was nine?
He hectors the doctor with the blue syringe,
the assistant in white.
His breath is a mix of narcissus
and nightshade; tainted eyes
catch the burnish of fluorescent bulbs.
He's not at all like a father
in sepia photographs: rakish mustache,
pleated wool trousers.
To think I had always imagined him
as someone from nighttime television
who reunites those twins separated at birth
and now forever marred
by what they missed. The cat is no longer.
Her body sheds its unused breath;
a muscle twitches in objection.
Nothing now can be undone. Any moment
the door will open; our lives will insist,
then come in.
Death licks the cat's face, smoothes her fur,
hands her back—
a hand warmed thing, improbably.
Putting Down a Cat
Death is more brutish than I expected.
Was this to whom I sent those love notes
when I was nine?
He hectors the doctor with the blue syringe,
the assistant in white.
His breath is a mix of narcissus
and nightshade; tainted eyes
catch the burnish of fluorescent bulbs.
He's not at all like a father
in sepia photographs: rakish mustache,
pleated wool trousers.
To think I had always imagined him
as someone from nighttime television
who reunites those twins separated at birth
and now forever marred
by what they missed. The cat is no longer.
Her body sheds its unused breath;
a muscle twitches in objection.
Nothing now can be undone. Any moment
the door will open; our lives will insist,
then come in.
Death licks the cat's face, smoothes her fur,
hands her back—
a hand warmed thing, improbably.
January 9, 2016
My favorite Mary Jo Bang thus far.
(3.5)
(3.5)
August 14, 2022
“I do not need
to tell you there is love that outlasts
an untender beginning. I cannot, nor would I
give back what’s been given.” — “Twilight Amnesia”
to tell you there is love that outlasts
an untender beginning. I cannot, nor would I
give back what’s been given.” — “Twilight Amnesia”
June 18, 2025
Reading this book, I’m reminded that Mary Jo Bang was a photographer before publishing this book. It’s something in my Bang readings that I wish I would have realized earlier. Because it speaks most directly to this speaker I’m always hearing in her work. The arch observer, the knows-better-than-you-but-you-probably-don’t-appreciate-it companion who’s taken the opportunity of the poem to explain that to you. I wrote about this some when I was companioning Bang’s speaker in the “The Harbor” to Jennifer S. Cheng’s essay “A Catalog of Falling.” I’ve long been enamored with this speaker. And appreciated how sharply she contrasts her perspective from anyone else in the room. Poet knows best might be one way to think of it.
I would argue the speaker in Apology for Want is like a version of Elizabeth Bishop preparing the way for Mary Jo Bang’s Louise, who appears in her second book, Louise in Love. To stretch my analogies so they fit with one another, imagine this speaker styled like Elizabeth Bishop, whose knowing observations shed light on some domestic subjects, some medical subjects (especially the body in its biological existence), and this “Elizabeth Bishop”-ish speaker has taken her gift for observation and framing to photograph some especially resonant scenes. This, for me, is the poetry of Mary Jo Bang's first book. Poems like “If Wishes Were Horses” or “Metaphor as Symptom of Reason’s Despair” offer what feels like a gilded frame to the Louise that will soon be arriving in her next book.
I remember the first time I’d heard her read from it, when she was emphasizing the the letter sounds that were being closely echoed. And I remember finding it curious that this would be what was emphasized for the poems. Because I still don’t hear those letter sounds when I’m reading the poems to myself. Yes, in “Twilight Amnesia,” there are letter pairings carved like inlaid ivory into a wooden box. But those pairings have a specific purpose, speaking to the poet’s relationship with her stepson. The majority of the book reads as a speaker removed from whatever immediate circumstance prompted the poem, providing sufficient space for her to carefully articulate what she sees happening. Perhaps what she sees carefully tracks with the actual scene. Comments she would pass to the actual people the poet imagines speaking to. Where the poems are like velvet rhetorical cudgels.
It’s not yet, however, the poetic speaker who’s deeply invested in affect and giving the reader that knowing look in her eye. A poetic speaker I find dominating Bang’s work since.
I would argue the speaker in Apology for Want is like a version of Elizabeth Bishop preparing the way for Mary Jo Bang’s Louise, who appears in her second book, Louise in Love. To stretch my analogies so they fit with one another, imagine this speaker styled like Elizabeth Bishop, whose knowing observations shed light on some domestic subjects, some medical subjects (especially the body in its biological existence), and this “Elizabeth Bishop”-ish speaker has taken her gift for observation and framing to photograph some especially resonant scenes. This, for me, is the poetry of Mary Jo Bang's first book. Poems like “If Wishes Were Horses” or “Metaphor as Symptom of Reason’s Despair” offer what feels like a gilded frame to the Louise that will soon be arriving in her next book.
I remember the first time I’d heard her read from it, when she was emphasizing the the letter sounds that were being closely echoed. And I remember finding it curious that this would be what was emphasized for the poems. Because I still don’t hear those letter sounds when I’m reading the poems to myself. Yes, in “Twilight Amnesia,” there are letter pairings carved like inlaid ivory into a wooden box. But those pairings have a specific purpose, speaking to the poet’s relationship with her stepson. The majority of the book reads as a speaker removed from whatever immediate circumstance prompted the poem, providing sufficient space for her to carefully articulate what she sees happening. Perhaps what she sees carefully tracks with the actual scene. Comments she would pass to the actual people the poet imagines speaking to. Where the poems are like velvet rhetorical cudgels.
It’s not yet, however, the poetic speaker who’s deeply invested in affect and giving the reader that knowing look in her eye. A poetic speaker I find dominating Bang’s work since.
October 7, 2023
This book is my sweetest corner of the world. I crawl back into it every time that I am lost.
When I first read this book, I was in college studying economics. Poetry was the perfect pallet cleanser back then. Now, as a working adult, I find myself drawn to prose and plot. However, Apology for Want still rang true. It's an escape that leads you right back to yourself.
No other reading experience makes me feel so centered in my body. Apology for Want is almost entirely about the human sensory experience and where that butts heads with yearning and existentialism. It spoke perfectly to a 19-year-old who was constantly being pulled out of her body and into a world designed to mock, yet prod, desire. It also spoke perfectly to a tired 25-year-old who needed a reminder of self. I have a feeling it will continue to speak perfectly to me at many intervals in the future.
My favorite thing about this collection is the lost sense of modernity. You can't pin down the time frame of these poems. Cars, surgeries, and prairie houses all illude to a post-war America; but it's vague. I was shocked, but somehow comforted, when I learned Apology for Want was published in 1997. It adds a certain knowing, or maybe a newness, to these words. It's a modern work that rejects the cliches, the dead give-aways and becomes quintessentially timeless.
Thank you Mary Jo Bang!
When I first read this book, I was in college studying economics. Poetry was the perfect pallet cleanser back then. Now, as a working adult, I find myself drawn to prose and plot. However, Apology for Want still rang true. It's an escape that leads you right back to yourself.
No other reading experience makes me feel so centered in my body. Apology for Want is almost entirely about the human sensory experience and where that butts heads with yearning and existentialism. It spoke perfectly to a 19-year-old who was constantly being pulled out of her body and into a world designed to mock, yet prod, desire. It also spoke perfectly to a tired 25-year-old who needed a reminder of self. I have a feeling it will continue to speak perfectly to me at many intervals in the future.
My favorite thing about this collection is the lost sense of modernity. You can't pin down the time frame of these poems. Cars, surgeries, and prairie houses all illude to a post-war America; but it's vague. I was shocked, but somehow comforted, when I learned Apology for Want was published in 1997. It adds a certain knowing, or maybe a newness, to these words. It's a modern work that rejects the cliches, the dead give-aways and becomes quintessentially timeless.
Thank you Mary Jo Bang!
May 18, 2017
A wonderful book of poetry. Certainly not everyone's cup of tea, but beautiful throughout. Existential, nihilistic, lyrical, and then, a surprise…love.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews