Recapitulation in the Wrong Key

Author: Mark Tardi

Publisher: Blazevox Books (2025)

In Recapitulation in the Wrong Key, Mark Tardi orchestrates a genre-defying work of poetry, elegy, and experimental forms. Half-sonnets, false starts, and Agent Orange reverberate to build a haunting meditation on memory, war, and family. “Because movement itself is a form of currency/ …Because you’re deceased, maimed or in Philadelphia.” A visceral, surreal sonata surfaces, bending syntax and expectation to witness the fractured terrain of personal and collective history.

—Sarah Mangold

This collection floored me. Poems like these play in a parallelism of the now and the then—what was once, possibly, considered gone but is somehow here, unexpected, and yet contrary to what we’re prone to call mere discovery. There are only a few poets who make real the idea that all language is available while still choosing the language best used—meaning sense plus surprise, meaning I leave with more life than I came in with. Tardi is a poet who does this time and again without fail.

—Jordan Stempleman