[close] Begun in response to Words of Mass Deception used to justify the US occupation of Iraq, The Nines are prose poems/essays derived from appropriated critical, scientific, and instructional texts (dealing with linguistics, Monet, breakdancing, and swine, among other topics). An act of resistance against narrative’s still-popular stranglehold on meaning-making, an indictment of the privileging of the intellect over the senses, The Nines parody the systems that would have us measure “knowledge and skills such as comprehension, vocabulary . . . geometry, physics, social deconstruction, and the Mayan calendar—only to discover the answer is B) Rod McKuen and Mary Oliver.” [close]