Poetry. Nada Gordon’s VILE LILT maximizes reader joy. Replete with a thousand new words, outrageous images and ornamental excess, VILE LILT tilts at and topples our literary expectations into a brackish puddle where countless, unfettered beings enter and engage our bodies and minds. Gagging we sit up with the realization that we’re in the presence of new poetry; VILE LILT takes the reader elsewhere.

In my mind there’s a dream-world where ornament, agon, & lyric have fused to make a wonderland, bristling with intellect, that goes rippling through me like a fetid & brocaded bolt of rainbow silk. Then I remember, oh right, the world that I’m dreaming of is sung into being by Nada Gordon, year by year, & now, with exemplary turbulence, here in this book. As a livid riposte to dry piety, these poems puncture the old stolid habits. As a wild embrace of what’s possible in writing, they open an extravagant horizon. For me, when I’m reading these ‘versus, ’ the dreams that I dream really do come true.–Dana Ward