There is a keenness in the poems of Apology for Want that one rarely encounters in a first collection, an unfailing and unflinching exactitude - of language, of metaphor, of emotion. Mary Jo Bang is a poet of unerring discernment, of uncanny perspicacity. The precision in these poems is never gratuitous; this is fine furniture where every nail is driven by necessity. Bang delineates the all-too-human condition of gazing and longing and gives us cautionary tales of what happens to those who shun restraint and yield instead to desperate attempts at satisfaction.