Reason and Other Women

Poetry. 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 seme-antics, and the byz-antics and -antiques from Christianity to Christine are molten down & recast into 21st Century mental shapes in the red-hot heart-red retort of a present day alchemist of mind. Alice Notley has the uncanny ability to go from the everyday mundane to the psycho-cosmic in one warp-speed stutter or typo-graphical stumble, at what Andre Breton called ‘la vitesse grand V.’ This is writing of the highest order–Pierre Joris.