Being Reflected Upon
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A noteworthy member of the self-appointed Second New York School, Notley (For the Ride) takes the title of her expansive 50th book from a poem by Frank O'Hara: she is "reflected upon" by people and places witnessed and imagined during a 17-year period of loss, illness, and joyful remembering from 2000 to 2017. After the death of her second husband ("Doug—April 21, 2000"), Notley lives in Paris ("for the health care"), having undergone radiation treatments for cancer. There, she is delighted to be—through a club membership—"an international poet." She visits her mother in Needles, Ariz., where she grew up: "she doesn't want me there because I know she's dying/ others don't seem to then she wants me there again/ and I'm there and back here and there and then there again./ I hate people who listen to music on machines." Interruptions in the form of dreams, flashbacks, Lucrezia Borgia, Ginsberg, an acid trip, her husbands and sons break the flow, though the poet's stamina and humor are good company throughout, "Dream old pay phone ringing in hospital I pick up/ receiver voice says ‘The answer is awe.' " Notley offers an intriguing and spirited reflection on a life in poetry.
