I Am You

Synopsis

I Am You collects three new poems: “The Aim of All Nature Is Beauty,” which Tardos wrote soon after the death or her husband and frequent collaborator Jackson Mac Low; “Letting Go,” a 100-page poem which combines memoir and self-examination in the face of loss, and the 50-page “The Letter: A Bloodbath.” These works deal frankly with aspects of grief and recovery, celebration and life building in poems of haunting, fragmentary beauty, which both reflect and record anger, hope and love, and provide us with a testament to a partnership built around creative compulsion, fun, and linguistic exultation.

Praise for this Book

‘A brilliant and disturbing masterpiece – an unpicking of elegy and its inevitable entanglements with ‘autobiography’. Its expression is supra-active and fast paced. it scans form and implications of the living and the dead. it exhumes and lays to rest. it left me stunned.’ —John Kinsella

Praise for Previous Work

‘In her marvelous new collection, Tardos plays with every possible verbal/visual/musical relationship: she invents narratives, records ‘real’ events (as in the case of 9-11 and her recent bout with surgery), and can work magic with the relationship of word to image, word to musical score, with multilingualism, and with the tension between high art and ‘ordinary’ signage.’ —Marjorie Perloff

‘Uxudo, a gift from technology, illuminated manuscript. Illuminated not as in ‘illustrated,’ but luminous, interactive in a sense that Blake would have understood. Or Zukofsky: that language is eyes. Ears, echoes. That, in fact, language itself, in our time certainly, must always be plural: a system of differences, midrashim to an Ur-text that never existed but perpetually surrounds us.’ —Ron Silliman