Mary Jo Bang

Biography

Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems, including A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf, 2017) and Elegy (Graywolf, 2009), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf, 2013), illustrated by Henrik Drescher, Purgatorio (Graywolf, 2021), and Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz (Northwestern UP, 2022). She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf, 2023) and a translation of Paradiso (Graywolf, 2025) are forthcoming.

See Work

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

The Dead of Winter

By Mary Jo Bang

The cold is a knife-slice on the skin.

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

The War

By Mary Jo Bang

It begins with a gesture and then grows

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

A Starting Point

By Mary Jo Bang

I told myself five hundred would be enough

to begin to make a plan.

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

Today you’re the still photographer

By Mary Jo Bang

on a movie set and you see the doctor

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

This is what you are, the self says to the self

By Mary Jo Bang

—a spectrum, an immeasurable gradient, during and after which

the places where you were can be tracked over a sprawling landscape

POETRY / Spring/Summer 2023

In the Movie of My Unraveling Mind

By Mary Jo Bang

The forest opens wide then closes once