Being Reflected Upon

Penguin Poets

By: Alice Notley

Narrated by: Alice Notley

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.

©2024 Alice E Notley (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Experimentation is the hallmark of Notley’s poetry; in nearly every book, a new method or idea arrives by which to channel her voice.” —Hannah Zeavin, The Paris Review

“[Readers] are in for a wild, kaleidoscopic ride . . . If her collection has a through line, it is Notley’s loves, incidental and formative, from long-term partners to someone met once on a ‘shuttle in Dallas.’” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

“A poetic journey . . . Fans of Notley will appreciate her new-age approach to her works; new fans will enjoy digging into her thoughts and visions through poems.” —The Philadelphia Tribune