Publisher Description

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 offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present.In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed--child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow&#151are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.

Author Biography

Alice Notley (born 8 November 1945) is an American poet. She was born in Bisbee, Arizona and grew up in Needles, California. She received a B.A from Barnard College in 1967 and an M.F.A. from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1969. She married poet Ted Berrigan in 1972, with whom she was active in the Chicago poetry scene and with whom she had two sons. In the early 70s she became rooted in New York's Lower East Side, where she was an important force from 1976 through 1992. After Berrigan died in 1983, Notley raised their two sons in New York's East Village by herself for seve

Table of Contents

mysteries of small housesWould Want to Be In My Wildlife House of Self I'm Just Rigid Enough Kiss of Fire One of the Longest Times The Future May Contain Me More Synchronous Chronology The Obnoxious Truth Requiem for the First Half of Split Experience 1965 Prophet's Job As Good as Anything "Go In and Out the Window" April Not an Inventory but a Blizzard 1970 Choosing Styles--1972 Not Child A Baby Is Born Out of a White Owl's Forehead--1972 They Cut Out Her Eye and So She Dosen't Know If It's Real Diversey Street I Must Have Called and So He Comes Colors--1973 Waveland (Back in Chicago) Collage "Bring Me a Pea Jacket and Sandwiches" The Howling Saint T-Shirt Place Myself in New York (Need One More There) The Trouble with You Girls Self ' 78 Speak 1979 A Dream The Year of the Premonitory Dream That Ted and Steve Left Me Hematite Heirloom Lives On (Maybe December 1980) C. '81 Gladly Though I Lost It and Knew I Would How We Spent the Last Year of His Life The Common Ground Ask Anyone You Know Point of Fidelity I--Towards a Definition II--The Person That You Were Will Be Replaced Flowers A Metaphysics of Emotion Becoming Egyptian Mid-80's You Can Give It Away But In This World Together and Not Passing Away The New York Human I Am a Hardened Heart The Brain Is a Toy but Loyalty's Metaphysical Sept 17 / Aug 29, '88 Owls Vertical Axis The Tyrant Alette 101 If I Didn't Shiver I Wouldn't Be Cold In Needless and to Poet What Are Real Things 1992 New Dreams 47th Birthday Bobby (First Visit Back to the States) In the Basement of Claypool's Department Store Going Back Mornings Place Blanche More Below a Dream Of Remember What I Came Here to Do to This World Very Little Actually Office Mysteries of Small Houses Lady Poverty

Prizes

Winner of L.A. Times Book Prize (Poetry) 1998

Details