Alice Notley: Early works & The Speak Angel Series (fonograf, 2023)

About The Speak Angel Series:

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. 

Paperback • 7 x 9.25 ” • 640pp • ISBN: 978-1-7378036-2-1 • Distributed by Small Press Distribution

About Early Works:

Winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Alice Notley is one of the greatest living poets. Nevertheless, Notley’s early poetry—published by small presses and in little magazines—has remained mostly inaccessible to readers. Early Works is the first volume to collect the poetry written between 1969 and 1974 that established Notley’s uncompromising vision. If in Notley’s Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970- 2005 we are encouraged to read her visionary poem “Your Dailiness” as the beginning of her career, Early Works offers a way to see “Your Dailiness” as the culmination of a writing practice that inaugurates her singular voice. Tracing Notley’s time living and writing across the United States and in Britain, Early Works gathers her first four books, 165 Meeting House Lane, Phoebe Light, Incidentals in the Day World, and For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday, as well as a little-known sonnet sequence “Great Interiors, Wines and Spirits of the World” and a large selection of uncollected poems. This work amounts to an unprecedented record of the relentless formal experimentation that Notley engaged in to create her own American poetic tradition. Full of permission to “Be unmetrical Be FRAGRANT,” as she writes in “A Corona,” Notley’s early poetry confirms, in the words of Ted Berrigan, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

​Paperback • 6 x 8.5 ” • 321pp • ISBN: 978-1-7378036-3-8 • Distributed by Small Press Distribution Publicity

Contact: Jeff Alessandrelli • [email protected]