Anne Tardos

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What’s poetry to do when world’s on fire? Ignore? Lament? Distract? Rage? Over her long career — and even fuller here in How Water Works — Anne Tardos has been developing poetry’s quirky all-inclusive sanity to express wonder and wisdom at the world as it is and must or might be. You follow the brilliant swerve of each declarative line (no telling where it will go next), appreciating the humor, the freedom, and the depth of vision. Following her usual strategy of formal constraints, the seventy-poem series is written in “sevens,” seven lines, seven words per line, forty-nine words per poem: forty-nine— the number of days, in traditional Buddhism, spent in the bardo, the in-between space that separates death from rebirth.

– Norman Fischer

Anne Tardos is one of the great avant-spirit poets and a traveler in time zones and multi-disciplinary word/sounds/ music/visual art gyrations. Great lineages… She focuses and releases her bilingual imagination. Cheers and attention to this book, a gnosis of water.

– Anne Waldman

The neutral tone I find in your recent work has a feeling of iron about it, but also the tenderness of angels and the clarity of fjords.

– John Olson

Your poems strike quite a few chords, with me, seeing as they are: precise, funny, science-forward, formal not formalist, colloquial not casual, surprisingly moving, reflexive but never coy. And there are many other things that the book is, and isn’t.

– Adam Frank (correspondence)