The Last Two Seconds (8 page)

Forever-thanks to family and to friends, especially to Mark Bibbins, Timothy Donnelly, Kathleen Finneran, Jennifer Kronovet, Lynn Melnick, Marjorie Perloff, David Schuman, and Mónica de la Torre. More thanks to Bill Clegg, and to Jeff Shotts and everyone at Graywolf Press who helped these poems become a book. Thanks also to Yuki Tanaka for locating Daisuke Ito, and to Daisuke Ito for permission to use the cover image.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six previous poetry collections, including
Elegy
, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a
New York Times
Notable Book. She has also published an acclaimed new translation of Dante’s
Inferno.
Bang has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She is a professor of English and teaches in the creative writing program at Washington University in Saint Louis.

Book design by Connie Kuhnz. Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.