Being Reflected Upon

Praise for Alice Notley’s most recent collection, For the Ride:

“As long as conformity threatens, Notley will continue to push against it, or perhaps simply beyond it. Her work warns of the ways in which our civilization and its conventional stories have failed us, but it’s also a reminder that the endless resources of language remain for those who have a little nerve.” —David Wallace, The New Yorker

“[For the Ride] is both challenging and rewarding, punctuating a remarkably long and quietly rebellious poetic career with an ellipsis of sorts, as it gestures to what has come before it, while also erasing or replacing it . . . [Notley's poetry] leaves the reader not with a sense of discovery but of setting out on a search which each work refuses to end” —The Times Literary Supplement

“A  postapocalyptic adventure into an unspecified future . . . [that] quickly accelerates into a trans-dimensional and gender-defying odyssey . . . A challenging, visionary work.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

“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