New Release: How Water Works by Anne Tardos

When the world feels as though it is perpetually on fire, politically, ecologically, spiritually, what is poetry to do? Should it turn away? Shout? Elegize? Ironize? Or should it, like water, move through everything: cooling, shaping, eroding, reflecting, carrying, transforming?

In How Water Works, Anne Tardos answers that question not with a manifesto, but with a lived poetics, quiet, alert, and astonishingly alive to the textures of language and reality. BlazeVOX [books] is thrilled to release this radiant new collection from one of the most inventive and philosophically curious poets writing today.

Over a long and groundbreaking career, Tardos has cultivated what Norman Fischer aptly calls poetry’s “quirky all-inclusive sanity.” In this seventy-poem sequence, she pushes that sensibility further than ever. Each poem follows a formal constraint of “sevens”: seven lines, seven words per line, forty-nine words total. That number, Fischer reminds us, echoes the forty-nine days of the Buddhist bardo, the liminal passage between death and rebirth. The result is a book that feels suspended in a threshold state: between thought and feeling, image and idea, material world and metaphysical insight.

Yet these poems are anything but solemn exercises. Tardos’s lines swerve brilliantly and unpredictably, alive with humor, surprise, and clarity. One moment we are grounded in the everyday; the next, drifting into cosmology, memory, or dream. Her language moves like water itself, sometimes placid, sometimes turbulent, always intelligent.

Anne Waldman recognizes this work as part of a deep avant-spirit lineage. Tardos is not merely experimenting with form; she is traveling across “time zones and multidisciplinary word/sound/music/visual art gyrations,” bringing her bilingual imagination into sharp focus. How Water Works becomes, in Waldman’s words, a kind of “gnosis of water”, a knowing that is felt as much as understood.

The collection also carries the tonal complexity that John Olson has admired in Tardos’s recent work: a neutral surface with an inner “iron,” balanced by tenderness and crystalline precision, like looking across a fjord at dawn, where everything is both severe and luminous.

And, as Adam Frank suggests, this is also a book that is deeply human: precise, funny, scientifically aware, formally daring without being coldly formalist, colloquial without being casual. The poems are reflexive, but never self-regarding; contemplative, but never remote. They open rather than close.

Anne Tardos has long been a singular figure in American poetry, author of fourteen books, translated widely, anthologized internationally, and a crucial editor of the posthumous work of Jackson Mac Low. Her signature multilingual approach, often interwoven with visual elements, has helped shape generations of experimental writing. Supported by institutions such as the Ford Foundation, NYFA, and the Rothschild Foundation, and commissioned by artists and musicians including baritone Thomas Buckner and the Dominique Lévy Gallery, Tardos continues to expand what a poem can be and do.

With How Water Works, she offers us a book that feels urgently contemporary and timeless at once, a meditative, playful, and deeply moving encounter with language, perception, and the elements that sustain us.

We are honored to welcome this extraordinary work into the BlazeVOX catalog.

Available now from BlazeVOX [books].

Book Information:
Paperback: 84 pages
Perfect-bound
ISBN: 978-1-60964-530-4
$18

Get your copy of How Water Works by Anne Tardos here