Mark Tardi

Mark Tardi is the author of the book Euclid Shudders (Litmus Press) and two chapbooks: Part First––––Chopin's Feet (g-o-n-g) and Airport music (Bronze Skull). Recent poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Van Gogh's Ear, and the anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Millenium. He was the 2009–2010 Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź and continues to teach there, translate Polish poetry, and torture himself with clay-court tennis, devastating bike rides and undying support for the Chicago Cubs and Liverpool FC.

Mark Tardi's poetry gives language back to that inanimate mass from which it, and we, originated. Every utterance is an act of configuration and every scribble traces a fleeting delineation between states of being and non-being. Tardi's poems exhale from the apparently insensate and resign the animate to perpetual motion. In this universe of receding matter and pulsing energy, Mark Tardi sets out to locate those "unpronounced angles" which make up the invisible but inextricable geometry of our lives. —Craig Watson

Euclid might well shudder at how far the line has come. In his wonderfully unruly first book, Mark Tardi composes an isotopic realm of getting and letting go, a kind of chemical algebra of the alleged world as it verges into music. —Elizabeth Willis