The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans

This compelling book takes its title from Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu. 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.