The Speak Angel Series - by Alice Notley (Paperback)

About the Book

"Composed of six interrelated full-length collections, The Speak Angel Series is a work of stunning accomplishment and ambition by Alice Notley, winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, among many other honors. The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new "characters" are incorporated from the news and from the poet's life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader of it chant if reading aloud, a spiritual sequel to the author's book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume's ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition."--Amazon.com.

Book Synopsis

The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new "characters" are incorporated from the news and from the poet's life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author's book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume's ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.

Review Quotes

"Speak Angel tries to find a musical form that keeps pace with the thinking of the dead, whose 'thoughts flash Syntax of/The instantaneous'. Unpunctuated lulls alternate with sonnetesque forms. Lines break down into stuttered fragments, words are spliced and recombined. Everything vibrates together, and 'there are no pieces in mind' or separation of consciousness from others or from the whole."--Andrea Brady "London Review of Books"

"Notley's lines on the page ask to be spoken; we are reading/hearing the entanglement of voice and mind as it happens before life and after life...a lament for losing time itself but gaining angel-like voices that live, like Notley's twenty-first century epic, in a timeless yet gorgeous collage."--David Rosenberg "The Brooklyn Rail"

"The Speak Angel Series is a report of visions and voices, and an account of the conditions for universal salvation...this volume continues, and perhaps culminates, the visionary-epic line of Notley's work."-- "Full Stop"

"This epic offering gathers six books written by Notley between 2013 and 2015 to form a series that invites the living and the dead to participate in an act of healing and reforming the universe. Notley draws on her formidable observational skills to position herself as a spiritual medium through which this collage of voices speaks, serving as a mythic guide toward the new, rehabilitated cosmos."-- "Publishers Weekly"

"Alice Notley is a disobedient medium: the dead speak through her and she speaks back. Sometimes she's a poet of intimate address, sometimes of epic sweep. Notley's formal experiments allow us to make contact with poetry's originary and anarchic force."--Ben Lerner

About the Author

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writer's Workshop, University of Iowa. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 90s. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin Prize, the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award. Notley may be most widely known for her epic poem The Descent of Alette. Recent books include Eurynome's Sandals, Certain Magical Acts, Benediction, and For the Ride. Notley is also a collagist, cover artist, and maker of hybrid art objects. An art book, Runes and Chords, is forthcoming or has already appeared.