A Film in Which I Play Everyone by Mary Jo Bang

A Film in Which I Play Everyone takes its title from a response David Bowie
gave to an interviewer asking if he had upcoming film roles. "Ia'm looking for
backing for an unauthorized autobiography that I am writing,a€ Bowie
answered. "Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to
sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version
in which I will play everybody.a€

Mary Jo Banga's brilliant poems might be the soundtrack to such a movie,
where the first-person speaker plays herself and everyone shea's ever met.
She falls in and out of love with men, with women, and struggles to realize her
ambitions while suffering crushing losses that give rise to dark thoughts.
Shea's drawn to stories that mirror her own condition: those of women who
struggle to speak in a world that would silence them. Embedded in these
poems are those minor events that inexplicably persist in the memory and
become placeholders: the time she lied and had her mouth washed out with
soap; the time someone said she wasna't his "original idea of beauty but
something. / Something he couldna't quite // put his hands ona€; the time she
stood in indifferent moonlight on a pier as a cat lapped at the water. Tinged
with dark humor and sharpened with keen camerawork, A Film in Which I
Play Everyone stars Bang at her best, her most provocative.

Graywolf Press
On Sale: Sep 5/23
6 x 9 • 96 pages
9781644452479 • $23.00 • pb
Poetry / American