The existence of this interstice threads throughout the poems in the collection: it shows up in the Ds, in the poem “Death and Disappearance” (p. 14) referring to the physical space “where cells line up / To meet the edge where the car takes the body away,” and again in the Gs, in the poem “Ghosts and Grays,” where

What is it, exactly, that separates two moments? The answer offered in “Z Stands for Zero Hour” (p. 70) is “[t]he news is this: / Between now and now is a rest.” Time is a difficult element to elucidate, so let’s consider the same dynamics transposed to music, where a rest is a defined length of silence that shapes the sounds surrounding it. In the same way, rests between moments lie outside of time, yet without them, time could not be demarcated and would therefore be an endless expanse: eternal. What enlightens these ideas is the prosody Bang employs as the vessel for their expression. Note how she creates precisely the rest being referred to by inserting a line break plus the most pregnant of pauses: the colon, in “The news is this:”. She then creates no such rest in the next line, “Between now and now is a rest,” nor does she lineate it in a way that emphasizes the rests between the “nows,” which would be easy enough to do in free verse, with punctuation or line breaks. Additionally, she tucks a string of short, largely monosyllabic words inside a darting meter, and as a result, the line exactly replicates the ceaseless speed of passing moments which renders the rests between them unnoticeable.

So just as Cosmic Aloneness is the bride of an existence she can never join in the first “A” poem, Eternity is the bride of a time she can never inhabit in the last “Z” poem. Part-way between, in “F is for Forgetting,” we are given leaden glimpses of time’s bride:

The eternal, then, is not real. It is only the staging we use in order to measure its opposite, which is, as we see in the “P” poem, “In the Present and Probable Future,”

The Bride of E, then, is an entity whose selfhood and marriage explore Existence, Experience, and Eternity in, dare I say, infinitely complex ways which are fully fleshed out in this extraordinary book that bears her name.

In an ironic twist, eternity is here seen to be bounded by time as much as it demarcates the moments of time. With her masterful technical control, Bang employs prosody to not only emphasize, but to actually enact this twist. The vehicle for the metaphor used to express eternity is the theater, and the sentences describing its transparent staging are choppy fragments and phrases punctuated by periods and stuttering plosive “k” sounds. Once walking out into the night is suggested, the sentences grow more complete and loop gracefully along for as much as three page-wide lines apiece to convey actual lived experience. In one such line, the speaker addresses the reader directly: “Listen, however events turn out, if we want we can continue to see / The image of moon as an outburst of lyric, a vision of John Keats / and his friends…” No more need be said to invoke Keats’ “still unravished bride of quietness” who undoubtedly graces the Grecian Urn to this day, his “foster-child of silence and slow time” whose beauty “cannot fade.” As stunningly beautiful as this un-Botoxed bride of existence may be, she is, sadly and cosmically, alone. However, her non-existence is a necessary part of her bridegroom’s existence. In the end, the speaker concludes that “Long after we are gone / We can say we were here.” When we die, we still will have existed. The significance of this may be a matter of considerable debate among the “pack of young flirts” who “read both Sartre and de Beauvoir” and “their blind-drunk partners” in the book’s opening poem, but this poem’s speaker assures us that it means “[n]othing is lost. If anything, we gain / Experience.” The Bride of E, then, is an entity whose selfhood and marriage explore Existence, Experience, and Eternity in, dare I say, infinitely complex ways which are fully fleshed out in this extraordinary book that bears her name.