Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new 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...

Originally published in 1964, The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan is considered by many to be his most important and influential book. This new annotated edition, with an introduction by Alice Notley, includes seven previously uncollected works. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, Berrigan's poems involve friendship and love triangles, but while the former happen chronologically, Berrigan's happen in the moment, with the story buried beneath a surface of names, repetitions, and fragmented experience. Reflecting the new American sensibilities of the 1960's as well as timeless poetic themes, The...

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...

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...

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...

This landmark collection brings Ted Berrigan's published and unpublished poetry together in a single authoritative volume for the first time. Edited by the poet Alice Notley, Berrigan's second wife, and their two sons, The Collected Poems demonstrates the remarkable range, power, and importance of Berrigan's work.

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...

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...

Following the highly acclaimed Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, poets Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan have collaborated again on this new selection of poems by one of the most influential and admired poets of his generation. Reflecting a new editorial approach, this volume demonstrates the breadth of Ted Berrigan's poetic accomplishments by presenting his most celebrated, interesting, and important work. This major second-wave New York School poet is often identified with his early poems, especially The Sonnets, but this selection encompasses his full poetic...

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...