The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Traveling deeper and deeper, she is on a journey of continual transformation, encountering a series of figures and undergoing fragmentations and metamorphoses as she seeks to confront the Tyrant and heal the world. Using a new measure, with rhythmic units indicated by quotations marks, Notley has created a spoken text, a rich and mesmerizing work of imagination, mystery, and power.

A memoir in verse from one of America's legendary poets

In a New York Times review of Alice Notley's 2007 collection In the Pines, Joel Brouwer wrote that the radical freshness of Notley's poems stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet's restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next. Notley's new collection is at once a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics, and a memoir through poems of her Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer. As Notley wrote these poems she realized that events during this period were connected to events in previous decades; the work moves from reminiscences of her mother and of growing up in California to meditations on illness and recovery to various poetic adventures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh. It is also concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and dead, stream-of-consciousness teasing out a lived physics or philosophy.

The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new characters are incorporated from the news and from the poet's life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author's book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume's ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.

Early Works collects Alice Notley's first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet

Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles--an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.

Once again, we encounter Notley as one the great interlocutors of the world, a dedicated advocate for what is between and beyond definition. --Tess Michaelson, Full Stop

Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of discussions over the last three decades. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets--Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver or William Carlos Williams--noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. During the late '60s and early '70s she lived a traveling poet's life before settling on New York's Lower East Side. For 16 years there, she was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School. Notley is the author of more than 40 books of poetry, including At Night the States, the double volume Close to Me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère and How Spring Comes, which was a co-winner of the San Francisco Poetry Award. In 1998, Penguin published Mysteries of Small Houses, which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. In 2015 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.

An important new work of poetry from Alice Notley, winner of the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest work sets out to explore the world and its difficulties, from the recent economic crisis and climate change to the sorrow of violence and the disappointment of democracy or any other political system. Notley channels these themes in a mix of several longer poems - one is a kind of spy novella in which the author is discovered to be a secret agent of the dead, another an extended message found in a manuscript in a future defunct world - with some unique shorter pieces. Varying formally between long expansive lines, a mysteriously cohering sequence in meters reminiscent of ancient Latin, a narration with a postmodern broken surface, and the occasional sonnet, these are grand poems, inviting the reader to be grand enough to survive, spiritually, a planet's ruin.

A bold and strikingly original new work from one of America's greatest living poets

Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort to change writing completely. The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, The Black Trailor, is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of Hemostatic range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Winner of the Los Angeles Time Book Prize

Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present.In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed--child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow--are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.

Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness ... Her protagonist, 'One, ' is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors of a global disaster. They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They 'sail' and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, before disembarking at an abandoned future city

Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging radical female poets at work today. Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored.

Ephemeral and anarchic, Runes and Chords is the first collection of artwork by famed poet, critic and artist Alice Notley. These sketches, drawn on an iPad and first serialized on Notley's Twitter feed, are a fascinating window into an evolving practice, collages of flowers and poetry, the white space of digital creation and overlaid colors erupting from the page. They defy containment and category, much like their creator--each a second in a day, an afternoon or evening in Paris, a thought so transient it can only exist in the medium of social media. With this collection, one of America's most influential living poets and artists continues to prove her worthiness of that title.

Early Works collects Alice Notley's first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

Poems from a master of the New York School.

This is an immense book, one in which Notley takes language, as she has it, 'from hearsay to heresy' by the speed and awe of an unwavering attention to the seams, seems and semes of words and sentences. This is the work of an iconoclast, a semioclast, where semantics become semeantics, and the byzantics and antiques from Christianity to Christine are molten down & recast into 21st Century mental shapes in the redhot heartred retort of a present day alchemist of mind. Alice Notley has the uncanny ability to go from the everyday mundane to the psychocosmic in one warpspeed stutter or typographical stumble, at what Andre Breton called 'la vitesse grand V.' This is writing of the highest orderPierre Joris.

A new collection that captures the austere serenity of the Southwest American desert.

Award-winning, Paris-based poet Alice Notley's adventurous new book is inspired by the life of Marie, a woman who resided in the dump outside Notley's hometown in the Southwestern desert of America. In this poetical fantasy, Marie becomes the ultimate artist/poet, composing a codex-calligraphy, writings, paintings, collage-from materials left at the dump. She is a culture of one. The story is told in long-lined, clear-edged poems deliberately stacked so the reader can keep plunging headlong into the events of the book. Culture of One offers further proof of how Notley has freed herself from any single notion of what poetry should be so that she can go ahead and write what poetry can be (The Boston Review).

An epic poem of genocide, designed to create power for the dead

Left dead after our cultures were broken by triumphant enemies, our stories changed to suit others. We now change them again to suit ourselves. Songs and Stories of the Ghouls purports to give power to the dead--voices to the victims of genocide both ancient and contemporary--and presence to women. Medea did not kill her sons; Dido founds a city, over and over again, the city of the present author's poetry. In these poems the poet asserts that though her art comes from a tradition as broken as Afghanistan's statuary, there is always a culture to pass on to one's children, and one is always involved in doing so. We are the ghouls, the drinkers of the blood-sacs, and we insist that we are alive.

Coming After gathers critical pieces by acclaimed poet Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small Houses and Disobedience.

Notley explores the work of second-generation New York School poets and their allies: Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, Ron Padgett, Lorenzo Thomas, and others. These essays and reviews are among the first to deal with a generation of poets notorious for their refusal to criticize and theorize, assuming the stance that only the poems matter. The essays are characterized by Notley's strong, compelling voice, which transfixes the reader even in the midst of professional detail. Coming After revives the possibility of the readable book of criticism.

Poetry. Women's Studies. More than twenty years in the writing, BENEDICTION is Alice Notley's single long poem of mourning, desire, loss, and vitality.