For the Ride
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A major new book-length visionary poem from a writer "whose poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry" (Robert Polito, the Poetry Foundation)
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Notley (Certain Magical Acts) has long been synonymous with the second generation of the New York school, feminist poetics, political dissidence, and, in the last several decades, an epic mode that gives her jittery, particular, and inventive poems a novelistic sweep. This visionary book is a postapocalyptic adventure into an unspecified future, one that begins "in the l'Orangerie in Paris with Monet's Water Lillies... a room of walls which come alive with images and words... like a mind?" but quickly accelerates into a trans-dimensional and gender-defying odyssey. One (her protagonist) and ones (One's interlocutors) board an ark made of language to save words from the threat of extinction: "One's not in time, what's One in? Chaos, beautiful chaos ," One observes. What follows is a series of 28 chapterlike poems embedded with smaller poems, which gives Notley boundless opportunities to comment on society ("Some ones are crying... opportune for some leaderly bullshit") and to hopscotch through thoughtlike threads of language. This is a challenging, visionary work.
