Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018

Early Works collects Alice Notley’s first four out of print poetry collections, along with 80 pages of previously uncollected material. A must have for any Notley fan. Includes original collection cover artwork by Philip Guston, Philip Whalen and George Schneeman, among others.

From editor Nick Sturm’s “Introduction” to Early Works:

In the author’s note that begins Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, Alice Notley writes, “My publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colorful and even beautiful.” I have always been enamored of this sentence, which reminds us that an array of dispersed and varying publishing contexts are the original sites that give shape to such a book’s form. It is also something of an invitation into that color and untidiness, a prompt to become more curious about the awkwardness and beauty of Notley’s publishing history. This book, Early Works, accounts for a significant portion of that history by bringing back into print the complete versions of her first four books, a little-known 22-poem sonnet sequence, and a large selection of early uncollected poems gathered from little magazines. In doing so, Early Works joins an important set of recent volumes that put Notley’s earlier poetry back into circulation, including Manhattan Luck (Hearts Desire, 2014), which collects four long poems written between 1978 and 1984, and Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, originally published by United Artists in 1979 and reissued in a facsimile edition by London-based Distance No Object in 2021. Each in their own way, and especially taken together, these books continue to confirm that, as Ted Berrigan writes in The Poetry Project Newsletter in 1981, “Alice Notley is even better than anyone has yet said she is.”

Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

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. 

In response to surges of violent British nationalism and political paranoia around borders, and to related social and ethical crises, JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky have assembled an anthology to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers brings together innovative writing from around the globe, celebrating the irreducible diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry. While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi Karim’s words.

The book is published by Boiler House Press to commemorate the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.

Alireza Abiz • Astrid Alben • Tim Atkins • Andre Bagoo • Veronica Barnsley • Khairani Barokka • Leire Barrera-Medrano • Katherine E. Bash • Áine Belton • Caroline Bergvall • Sujata Bhatt • Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Fióna Bolger • Ben Borek • Andrea Brady • Serena Braida • Wilson Bueno • James Byrne • Kimberly Campanello • J.R. Carpenter • Mary Jean Chan • che • Matthew Cheeseman • Iris Colomb • Giovanna Coppola • Anne Laure Coxam • Sara Crangle • Emily Critchley • Ailbhe Darcy • Nia Davies • Tim Dooley • Benjamin Dorey • Angelina D’Roza • Katherine Ebury • Dan Eltringham • Ruth Fainlight • Kit Fan • León Felipe • Alicia Fernández • Veronica Fibisan • Steven J Fowler • Livia Franchini • Ulli Freer • Anastasia Freygang • Kit Fryatt • Monika Genova • Geoff Gilbert • Peter Gizzi • Chris Gutkind • Cory Hanafin • Edmund Hardy • David Herd • Jeff Hilson • Áilbhe Hines • Alex Houen • Anthony Howell • Nasser Hussain • Zainab Ismail • Maria Jastrzębska • Lisa Jeschke • Evan Jones • Loma Sylvana Jones • Maria Kardel • Fawzi Karim • Kapka Kassabova • Özgecan Kesici • Mimi Khalvati • Robert Kiely • Michael Kindellan • Igor Klikovac • Ágnes Lehóczky • Éireann Lorsung • Patrick Loughnane • John McAuliffe • Aodán McCardle • Niall McDevitt • Luke McMullan • Christodoulos Makris • Ethel Maqeda • Lila Matsumoto • Luna Montenegro • Stephen Mooney • Ghazal Mosadeq • Erín Moure • Vivek Narayanan • Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton • Alice Notley • Terry O’Connor • Wanda O’Connor • Gizem Okulu • Claire Orchard • Daniele Pantano • Astra Papachristodoulou • Fani Papageorgiou • Richard Parker • Sandeep Parmar • Albert Pellicer • Pascale Petit • Adam Piette • Jèssica Pujol Duran • Alonso Quesada • Ariadne Radi Cor • Nat Raha • Nisha Ramayya • Peter Robinson • William Rowe • Lisa Samuels • Jaya Savige • Ana Seferovic • Sophie Seita • Seni Seneviratne • Timea Sipos • Zoë Skoulding • Irene Solà • Samuel Solomon • Agnieszka Studzinska • James Sutherland-Smith • George Szirtes • Rebecca Tamás • Harriet Tarlo • Shirin Teifouri • Virna Teixeira • David Toms • Sara Torres • Kinga Toth • Claire Trévien • David Troupes • Arto Vaun • Juha Virtanen • J. T. Welsch • David Wheatley • Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese • Jennifer Wong • Isaac Xubín • Jane Yeh

Alice Notley has consistently peopled her poetry with the voices of those around her: kids, friends, husbands, strangers, and the dead. Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley offers an array of interpretations of this technique. While not aspiring to completeness, and limiting its attention to one formal aspect of a single author's work, this poem-essay sketches relationships between intimate speech and literary language.

A HANDBOOK OF DISAPPOINTED FATE highlights a decade of Anne Boyer's interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.

"The essays in this book model the poet’s no: they refuse to make things easy when they aren’t, preserving the messy difficulty of cancer, of poverty, of staying alive under capitalism." - Julia Bosson

Poets Lee Ann Brown and Bernadette Mayer, old friends, began a specific correspondence in early 2020 with the intention of editing them into a book. The poems, letters, letter-poems, pletters, cover the first songbirds of spring, works and advice from friends, art, lists from the messy old internet, the possibility of seeing one another again, some day. Bernadette passed away on November 22, 2022, 3 weeks before this book was completed and bound. Throughout the text Lee Ann and Bernadette merge two distinct and unique voices in both a poetic, loving and humorous sharing. In a letter from Bernadette to Lee Ann she writes: “I imagine the voice to be/ yrs/ Because it is/not/mine.”

Building on previous projects centered on the pedagogy of poets, and friendship through correspondence, LOST & FOUND SERIES VII breaks new ground to present unpublished and presently unavailable materials by novelist, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara; iconic poet-activist-teachers Audre Lorde and June Jordan; scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Jack D. Forbes, and letters between North American poet and translator Paul Blackburn and Argentinian in exile novelist, poet, and translator Julio Cortázar.

While Cortázar and Blackburn forged their own institution of sorts, through a friendship that would help ignite the Latin American boom, Forbes, Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde worked in and out of institutions to help transform the landscape of our educational and historical horizons and expectations. For some years Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde all taught together in the City University of New York, the largest urban system in the United States, collaborating with activist students and other faculty to create new curriculum in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women's Studies. At the same time, Blackburn also taught part-time at City University, while bringing the vision of another world into American English, through his translations of Cortázar, a champion of the Cuban revolution and a writer of unparalleled influence in Latin America. On the other side of the country, Dr. Jack Forbes's vision of hemispheric Indigenous life was brought to bear on his involvement in the creation of D-Q University, the first Indigenous university in California, as well as the creation of Native American Studies at UC Davis, a program that would be emulated at other universities in North America. At the same time, his extraordinary and almost unknown poetry, featured here along with notable materials on his educational activism, presents a vision of Los Angeles cutting across race, class, and ethnicity that the work of all the writers in this Series help us realize.

SERIES VII Includes:

Audre Lorde
"I teach myself in outline," Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha 

Toni Cade Bambara
"Realizing the Dream of a Black University," & Other Writings (Parts I & II)

June Jordan
"Life Studies," 1966-1976 

Jack Forbes
"Yanga Ya," Selected Poems & The Goals of Education 

Paul Blackburn & Julio Cortázar
"Querido Pablito"/"Julissimo Querido," Selected Correspondence, 1958-1971 (Parts I & II)