Nada Gordon’ s poetry is robust and vivacious, so eager to endorse and circulate language that it is guaranteed to challenge, and probably offend, any rigidly defined aesthetic position. Her work presents human inadequacy, tackiness and dumbness as a grand Rabelaisian spectacle, a parade of vacuous and sparkling half-assedness of which Nada is the Queen and drum majorette. Nada is sympathetic to human frailty, which she presents in its active dimension; she presents to us an incomprehensive language created by people who are unable to know exactly how pathetic they look to others (although they often suspect it, and sometimes resent it). Nada’ s poetry asserts democratic values, the right of all to speak and be heard, even if their voices are deficient or grotesquely strange. — Stan Apps