Banned for Life by Arlene Ang Arlene Ang’s writing style is slightly surrealistic and completely stream of conscious in this hidden gym entitled Banned for Life. Filled with dark and light imagery, poems that one does not simply read for simple understanding, and complexity, Ang draws the reader into the poem, and forces them to think about the poetry. Having to reread most poems twice and thrice, the reader is caged in Ang’s words, perplexed and filled with a little bit of dread and anxiety from lines like, “The girl is wearing bracelets/of scars. She is purpling under both eyes./She is all poise and dead leaves.” She casts light onto dark images and embraces that life is not simple, life has never been simple, and will never be simple. She addresses reality:            The brain, forever the battlefield,            is littered with the dead and the living            assigned to take the bodies of the dead away. Life and death are both accounted for in less like a neat circle, than a …