Reason and Other Women

Overview

"This is an immense book, one in which Notley takes language, as she has it, 'from hearsay to heresy' by the speed and awe of an unwavering attention to the seams, seems and semes of words and sentences. This is the work of an iconoclast, a semioclast, where semantics become semeantics, and the byzantics and antiques from Christianity to Christine are molten down & recast into 21st Century mental shapes in the redhot heartred retort of a present day alchemist of mind. Alice Notley has the uncanny ability to go from the everyday mundane to the psychocosmic in one warpspeed stutter or typographical stumble, at what Andre Breton called 'la vitesse grand V.' This is writing of the highest order"Pierre Joris.

Author Biography

Alice Notley, born in Needles, California, denizen for years of New York City where she was a key writer in the second generation "New York School" of poetry, along with her partner Ted Berrigan. She has become, since the late 1970s, one of our most probing, visionary, and enlightened feminist poets, yet her work goes beyond categorization. She has lived in Paris for the last few decades.