On Alice Notley for The Poetry Center Newsletter

(Tucson, 2006)

Alice Notley’s poetry crosses genres, breaking border rules wherever she encounters them, form traditional to radical poetics and politics. Playful, dark, surreal, philosophical, mystical, autobiographical, fictional–like all the great poets, she’s on a search for truth through a deep engagement with language and reality. In her recent books, she has succeeded in stealing character and story away from the novel and giving it back to poetry in a radically different way. Her writing is fiercely beautiful, experimental and independent.