Alice Notley’s two books, Close to me & Closer… (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape/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
Praise for Close to me & Closer… (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère
Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets… Infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfulness, 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.
— Tom Clark
The most thrilling thing about Close to me & Closer… (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère—aside from the joy of reading them—is how they act as explorations of gestures that lead to The Descent of Alette. […] Notley is practicing. Trying out these impulses that will ultimately lead to an incredible thing.
— Diana Arterian, The Offending Adam