Nine

What glee in the Nine, this tour de force of genius trickster complexity, “all about equipping poetry.” And Anne Tardos does this accouterment-ing like a Buddhist deity with many arms and heads. “Rub together two neurons and you have a mind” and play with nines and you have a rich compendium of unsurpassed wild multi-lingual-mental invention and words stomping around as richly palpable (non gendered!) masters of the universe. I got so refreshed by the wit and tenderness I couldn’t stop. —Anne Waldman Anne Tardos, whose poetry & performances have enlightened us for several decades now, emerges in Nines as an innovator of new forms as a vehicle for work that incorporates, like all great poetry, the fullest range of thoughts & experiences & makes them stick in mind & memory. I am struck, as rarely happens, by this combination of form & content, each a powerful extension of the other. —Jerome Rothenberg Reading Anne Tardos's Nines feels like living in the middle of everything and anything that is, isn't, can't, can, ought to be, needs to be, happening in just this way, right now, in language, sometimes several languages, while accompanied by a dear and reliable friend (once in a while flailing around wildly, though in a controlled way - nine word lines, nine line poems, no matter how improbably) whose sensible voice soothes, jokes, seduces, pokes fun at itself, and now and then a line that astonishingly simply tells you the truth about your life, despite everything. A truly, literally, wonderful book. With an astute and illuminating introduction by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. —Norman Fischer Although in compact nine-word/nine-line containers, the poems in Nines are capacious. Formally inventive, philosophical, speech-like, sometimes syntactically tousled, they are as amusing as they are intensely serious. Autobiography, community, love, mortality, dark humor, and whimsy all make appearances in these meticulously timed gems. Genius9. —Nada Gordon