LOUISE IN LOVE

Bang’s new collection is a series of short- to medium-length lyrics disguised as a verse-novel about a woman named Louise, and a few shadowy figures besides. It is not altogether successful in being a novel, because it does not finally want to be one—although the disguise is important. Louise is, in some ways, an identifiable character: she is prone to fits of whimsy, she admires extravagance for its own sake, and she is a resolute onanist—although more discreet than Whitman. But her consistency of character is not paralleled by a process of growth or change; it is instead turned toward an improbable linguistic experiment, in which Bang rings as many variations as possible on the theme of stasis, which she suggestively terms, “The danger of languid and largo.” That Bang succeeds at all in this experiment is testament to her genius for improvisation and her commitment to making things new. Occasionally, she lets her hand show too plainly and the result is drab, but there are many moments of reverie where Louise is given a preternatural, ecstatic sharpness of vision: “She stood on a rise overlooking a road / alongside a lake that flowed into another, / and another, and another like hours / babbling their latebreaky news.” There is a loneliness in these lines stronger than the romance promised in the collection’s title. One suspects, in the end, that love is both too serious and too silly for Louise, “a mind that knows nothing of boundaries,” and calls itself “the erotic singsong of motion.” It is the playfulness of these poems, the erotics of words among words, that makes them memorable and argues their importance.

Don’t be fooled by the frou-frou: this girl can dance.