Mary Jo Bang’s The Bride of E
reviewed by Brandi George
Yes. And yes: “I cross the street. A horn doesn’t stop me. I cross and cross. On the other side I look back to see the commotion. The driver of the car looks at me, the horn still not stopping, meets my eyes. He sees into me and says, ‘Not you, fuck-face.’ Twelve years later I’m a frayed edge. I’m under everything I know” (76). This is a passage from “G is Going,” a section which blurs the lines between poetry and prose. Bang proves that good literature defies classification—it has a mysterious essence. As David Kirby writes in What Is a Book, “great books contain, not many secrets, but too many secrets” (10).
Mary Jo Bang’s speakers in The Bride of E are a great example of what Keats, in his letters, termed negative capability: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats 42). Furthermore, he writes, “Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neural intellect—[for] they have not any individuality, any determined Character” (35). For Keats, the true artist leaves behind his identity and acts as a channel. Mary Jo Bang, in an interview with Vincent Guerra asserts, “I consider my speakers to be more or less androgynous. I want to disappear behind the speaker the way an actress or actor disappears behind the role they are playing.” Furthermore, Bang aims “to cause the reader to question received ideas about both the world and language, and to appreciate the essential ambiguity of both.”
All the poems in The Bride of E embody this essential ambiguity from the voice of an androgynous speaker. The various poem titles and images work together to create an intimacy between speaker and reader, a momentary refuge from Bang’s bleak truth: “Cosmic Aloneness Is the Bride of Existence,” which is the title of the first poem in her book. This aloneness is inescapable, even as the speakers try to make connections. In “A Equals All of a Sudden,” Bang writes:
One evening I came into work
And asked the maintenance men
If I was in the same category
As sweeping trash off the floor.
The foreman said, ‘I want a pass.’
He looked directly at me.
I could see his eyes
Boring straight into me. (lines 41-48)
As seen in this example as well as the beginning quote, there is a brutality in our refusal to see, our refusal to recognize one another, which creates this “cosmic aloneness.” In the same poem Bang writes:
It was dark all of a sudden
And I translated that
Into a foreign text
That would see me through
Every subsequent day:
‘In the dark we played capture the flag.’
No, not in the dark but in the all
Of a sudden lacerating absence. (lines 63-67)
Furthermore, in “A As In Alice”:
If she fell all the way down the dark she’s looking through.
Would strange creatures sing songs
Where odd syllables came to a sibilant end at the end.
In the last line of “The Electric Eventual," Bang writes “A thing of significance: death with a name on the bracelet.” And the title “D Is Dying, As One Going In the Dark,” creates the impression that absence is the significance, that dying and aloneness matter. In the wake of postmodernism, Bang uses nothingness, fragmentation and despair to create a longed for intimacy between reader and poet. In “H Is Here Is A Song, Now Sing,” Bang writes, “The goblet mouth on the table speaks/To your thirst, saying, ‘Longing, your longing, is infinite’” (lines 20-21). Thus, everywhere is the Bride of Everywhere. In the last stanza of “E is Everywhere,” Bang writes: “All the while you’re wondering//About the man on the curb who waved at you./As if he knew you./As if you have been everywhere./As if you are existence.”
Works Cited
Keats, John. Selected Letters. Ed. Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002
Kirby, David. What Is a Book? Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002.
Bang, Mary Jo. The Bride of E. Minneapolis: Grey Wolf Press, 2009.
Brandi George is an MFA candidate at Florida State University. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lily Fellowship. Her work has recently appeared in Quercus, Harpur’s Palate, and The Diry Napkin.
