Mary Jo Bang in Spain PRESS RELEASE THE AMERICAN POET MARY JO BANG
VISIT MADRID AND BARCELONA
Within a European tour that will take as a writer
invited to the Leipzig Book Fair and
to Berlin, the poet Mary Jo Bang (
awarded the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award
in 2007) will visit Spain from
next 22 to 24 March, giving a series of readings of his work
in Madrid, Alcala de Henares and Barcelona.
Mary Jo Bang (Waynesville, Missouri, 1946), has published six books of poetry to date: The Bride of E (2009), Elegy (2007), The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (2004), The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of the Swans (2001), Louise in Love (2001), Apology for Want (1997), work which won the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize (1996). Elegy (Translated by Jaime Priede and published last September in Bartleby Poetry Library) is the only book translated and published in Spain.
currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), where she teaches English and directs the Creative Writing Program at Washington University.
Readings / Presentations:
Madrid: Hotel Kafka (Hortaleza, 104). 22/03/1911 20 h.
Speakers: Jordi Doce, Julieta Valero and the author.
Barcelona: Llibreria Laie (Pau Claris, 85). 24/03/1911 19:30 Speakers: Eduardo Moga. Alex Chico and the author.
What the press says about Elegy:
We are not in another book, but to a single text
(ABC Cultural - Jaime Siles)
Bang drags the reader along the path of poetry that emerges from the visceral need writing. The quiet and without fanfare pain of a mother to the child's death will not reverse in fact melodrama, but a first-class research on language and its limits
(Culture (s) - La Vanguardia - Anna Carreras)
Bang has trained herself to bring forth from their suffering a wealth of emotions that we do not get emotional comfort or education, but aesthetic pleasure and drive to live
(Cultures LNE - Luis Muniz)
A splendid and honest exercise where the language goes into the ways of naming the absence
(Revista de Letras - Javier Moreno)
The gap becomes food for thought and lucidity and pain transfigured into a
growth factor (Review Meetings - Santos Dominguez)
A small masterpiece
(Diario de Menorca - Lluís Vergés)
One text more personal and sincere that I have read
(Arts and Letters - Herald Aragon - Henry Villagrasa)
Some books are dropped as a continuous shock, electrical, leaving little room for respite. Elegy may be one of these
(Cuadernos del Sur - Sara Ulate)
One of the best books of poetry this year
(Library Cervantes Alcalá - Javier Rodriguez)
A book that will have to talk
(Culturama - Ernesto García López)
with a verse real, well-armed and strong formal structure, Mary Jo Bang vertebra intense love song where the lights, beautify and saddened by all that touches and where vivid memory stands
(Andalusia Information - Jorge de Arco )
These poems, scraping the throat of the reader, reveal, however, the good offices of a great poet
(Koult - José Ángel García Caballero)
Not that the poems of Mary Jo Bang has not learning. Is that the author knows the pain does not stop, it just transforms. To learn of the loss is to lose less
(Storm in a glass - Sofia Castanon)
One of the most recognizable names in the U.S. last poetry
(Babelia - The Country - Ángel L. Prieto de Paula)
Bartleby Editores anapmares@gmail.com