The last two seconds: poems

The Last Two Seconds is an astonishing confrontation with time--our experience of it as measured out by our perceptions, our lives, and our machines. In these poems, full of vivid imagery and imaginative logic, Mary Jo Bang captures the difficulties inherent in being human in the twenty-first century, when we set our watches by nuclear disasters, species collapse, pollution, mounting inequalities, warring nations, and our own mortality. This is brilliant and profound work by an essential poet of our time.

The Earthquake She Slept Through -- Costumes Exchanging Glances -- You Know -- Masquerade: After Beckmann -- At the Moment of Beginning -- Wall Street -- The Storm We Call Progress -- Provisional Doubt as an Architectural Space -- The Too-Bright Light Will Wash You Out -- An Individual Equinox Suitable for Framing -- Equidistant from the Center of Never -- Rude Mechanicals -- The Circus Watcher -- Silence Always Happens Suddenly -- Practice for Being Empty -- An Autopsy of an Era -- A Calculation Based on Figures in a Scene -- The Numbers -- Lions and Tigers: The Escaped Animal Was Bent to the Trainer's Will -- Can the Individual Experience Tragic Consequences? -- The Blank of Reason Produces Blank: After Goya -- The Perpetual Night She Went Into -- Except for Being, It Was Relatively Painless -- Time Trap: The Perpetual Moment -- Had There Been -- A Man Mentioned in an Essay -- Let's Say Yes -- Scene after Scene -- This Bell Like a Bee Striking -- The Nerve Fibers -- To Write a History -- Opened and Shut -- There She Was -- Explain the Brain -- The earthquake in this case was -- Two Places and One Time -- Two Frames -- A Technical Drawing of the Moment -- Under the Influence of I…