Today is awesomepoet Mary Jo Bang’s birthday. Over on her wall, the best wishes are piling up; fellow awesomepoet Erin Belieu even proclaimed-

All hail Mary Jo’s existence! Hip hip, hooray!

which seems just about right to me. As our regular readers know, HTMLGiant encourages you to celebrate the existence of writers you admire and enjoy by reading their work and buying their books. You can start over at Poets.org, where there are five MJB poems and a bio. A similar setup, but with mostly different poems, can be found at the Poetry Foundation. Her most recent collection is The Bride of E, and the one before it, Elegy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Those two are both published by Graywolf. I also know many people who are strong partisans for her early book, Louise in Love. All this plus The Eye like a Strange Balloon and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans, so there’s really no excuse for not getting your fill. Mary Jo Bang, HTMLGiant wishes you a very happy birthday, and advises that you never–ever–do a Google image search for your last name. Cheers!