The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans

This title won the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Mary Jo Bang has also been the winner of the Bakeless Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Poetry Society's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.

With a bow to Beckett's linguistic playfulness, Bang's collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world. Her savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, and places.

This compelling book takes its title from Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu. In Beckett's play, a grieving beloved seeks relief from the haunting presence of a departed lover in a place where "From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the Isle of Swans." With a bow to Beckett's style and linguistic playfulness, Mary Jo Bang's collection of poems deals compassionately and gracefully with the tangible world.

Bang's savvy alliterative insistence sweeps the reader along, as her poems collectively offer a world delicately structured from memorable fragments of experience, emotion, things, and places—inside and outside the human psyche.