Think of those intricate rooms behind glass at the Art Institute of Chicago, a chandelier dangling from crown molding at 1:12 scale. Each poem feels like a scene from a life re-enacted on a dollhouse movie set, a scaled-down world. “In my numb mind, a little leather jacket,/the sleeve no bigger than a thumb drive,” she writes, in “A Miniature.” “In that diminished instance,/I light a cigarette. They’re small because they’re stored in cells, in our nutshells, our mental microfiche. The work of miniaturizing a life is painstaking, and Bang’s poems have a characteristic clockwork precision — they tick and spin like mechanical music boxes.

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Persons: “, Rosencrantz, hutch, Mary Jo Bang, ” Organizations: Art Institute of Chicago Locations: Denmark