Poetry. Alice Notley’s two books collected here, CLOSE TO ME & CLOSER… and DESAMERE, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape measure. She’s invented a measure. The text is a rich current crossing, as at the moment of imagining, into being in death and in an expanded life. Notley transgresses conventional contemporary categories of genre; rather than genre, the form of the writing is the mind’s inner sense and motion. Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets…infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfullness, full of heart, intensity and wonder, provocatively addressing forever unsolved questions of form and identity, life and death, imagination and gender, Notley’s poems are unsettling and inspiring–the San Francisco Chronicle. Other Alice Notley titles available from SPD include ALMA, OR THE DEAD WOMEN; FROM THE BEGINNING; and WALTZING MATILDA.