Museum of Mary
By Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf, February 2, 2026
A pouty look, a flirty look, how should one
look? To be the queen of anything
isn’t easy. What is easy? You have got this,
is frequently said. Frequently recently.
To be favored, to have grace bestowed upon
when everyone in the Book of Hours is busy
contorting themselves to make sense
of what it feels like to be in the light.
—from “Hail Mary”
Mary Jo Bang’s The Museum of Mary guides the reader through a kaleidoscopic gallery of artworks that each depict a shifting portrait of Mary—the name of the Madonna, the Blessed Virgin, the grieving mother of Christ, the doomed monarch, the author of Frankenstein, the television star, the Grammy-winning singer, and the poet herself. These intimate and alluring poems echo across time to give voices to women who were, who are, foreclosed and silenced. One Mary is told she has no power over her body and what will happen to it. One Mary’s claim leads to her imprisonment and beheading. One Mary is arrested for dressing like a man. One Mary is ignored in her lifetime and forgotten ever since. One Mary looks deeply, imaginatively into artworks and writes down what she sees, what she has lived.
A resounding feat of associative leaps, The Museum of Mary is an innovative way of encountering the world and a daringly honest way of confronting the self.
Selected Praise
“Bang’s cinematic ninth collection takes a tour of lived experience through a capricious lens that superpositions the familiar and the uncanny... Wry and invigorating, this resonant collection mollifies the need for certainty.”
—Publishers Weekly
“These inventive, sharp poems are written like the best scenes of a film, the kind that make a movie memorable, and Bang directs her readers toward the points of view she wants them to experience, in the exact way she wants them to be experienced, like any good filmmaker would.” —Amber Tamblyn, Bust
“For all of us who are searching for ways to understand the life given to us, A Film in Which I Play Everyone parses that endless mystery.”
—Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism
“Many of these poems deal either directly or indirectly with outsiderness—the feeling that someone else is directing your movie... She is suggesting, it seems, that being oneself, and being at peace with the world, can be a good and even necessary alternative to being in power. Then again, why should the two be mutually exclusive? Why should anyone have to choose?”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
About the Author
Mary Jo Bang has published nine previous poetry collections, including Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and new translations of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.
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