Traveling on the Number Nine Bus: Nonet Poems

In Traveling on the Number Nine Bus, Fran Abrams utilizes a modern invented verse form, the Nonet, to good effect in depicting life as experienced on a city bus. We learn the secrets of passengers and driver alike as the bus travels back and forth along the streets of an unnamed city. Take a ride on the Number Nine — you never know who you might meet.

—Gregory Luce, author, Riffs & Improvisations and Smells Like Rain

In an unpredictable and often menacing world, Fran Abrams offers us solace in the form of the Number Nine Bus that “gets you on time where you need to go.” The bus ride itself, like life, is not without drama: bridges might “crumple,” large high school students “use bodies and book bags like unguided missiles,” and “small stolen pills [are] hidden so carefully” in someone’s purse. Abrams, a prizewinning visual artist and poet, employs unusual poetic forms — visually appealing Nonets and reverse Nonets — to ground us and help dispel our fears. We can put our trust in the driver of the bus — the one who “knows the way.”

—Nancy Naomi Carlson, author, Piano in the Dark and winner, Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

Reading Fran Abrams’ poems makes me want to hop right on the Number Nine Bus! Next best: I get to read these delightful poems, and marvel at Abrams’ ability to create a world, a world I want to be a part of, in these Nonets.

—Ann Quinn, author, Final Deployment and Poetry is Life