ALICE NOTLEY For the Ride
“Alice Notley is a disobedient medium: the dead speak through her and she speaks back. Sometimes she’s a poet of intimate address, sometimes of epic sweep. Notley’s formal experiments allow us to make contact with poetry’s originary and anarchic force.” —Ben Lerner, National Book Award finalist and author of No Art
A major new book-length visionary poem from a writer “whose poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry” - Robert Polito, Poetry Foundation
“It should be read for pleasure.” - Alice Notley
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 book, For the Ride, is another such work. The 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. (Penguin, 2020)
Photos: KIRBY (Pictured here live at knife | fork | book 14 March 2020)