For the Ride

Starred review from November 18, 2019
Notley (Certain Magical Acts) has long been synonymous with the second generation of the New York school, feminist poetics, political dissidence, and, in the last several decades, an epic mode that gives her jittery, particular, and inventive poems a novelistic sweep. This visionary book is a postapocalyptic adventure into an unspecified future, one that begins “in the l’Orangerie in Paris with Monet’s Water Lillies... a room of walls which come alive with images and words... like a mind?” but quickly accelerates into a trans-dimensional and gender-defying odyssey. One (her protagonist) and ones (One’s interlocutors) board an ark made of language to save words from the threat of extinction: “One’s not in time, what’s One in? Chaos, beautiful chaos—,” One observes. What follows is a series of 28 chapterlike poems embedded with smaller poems, which gives Notley boundless opportunities to comment on society (“Some ones are crying... opportune for some leaderly bullshit”) and to hopscotch through thoughtlike threads of language. This is a challenging, visionary work.

February 1, 2020

What happened after Noah tried to save the known world by filling the ark as compared with what could have happened: that's the territory of this difficult, genre-bending 36th book from Ruth Lily Prize winner Notley (Certain Magical Acts). A preface suggests that the book began with the 74-year-old Notley standing in L'Orangerie in Paris looking at a canvas of Monet's Water Lilies spread wall to wall and entering a trancelike state. Divided into 18 long poems containing several shorter ones (some written in French), the epic poem that resulted tells a variation of the story of Noah and the ark (or art, as Notley suggests). But instead of saving the world, a narrator tries to save the "word" from an apocalypse of rain and foggy grayness--restoring it to its original vibrancy. "One," the poem's protagonist, is dubbed The First Maker or The Celestial Presence and cannot stop vibrating/speaking, saying things like: "Let's call this grey stuff light." VERDICT Written in a breathless e.e. cummings style, the poem fractures the rules of spelling, grammar, syntax, and formal poetry and is at times unintelligible. But it also brims with fresh, vibrant metaphors and irony, not the least being the religious innuendos that permeate the text. For sophisticated readers of poetry.--C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2020
Ruth Lilly Prize-winner Notley has created a book-length futuristic odyssey into the body of language through the glyph, a sort of platonic portal into a dimension in which language morphs and mutates both for the character, One, and for the reader. As One gathers understanding and a cadre of beings who accompany One on the journey, un- / bodied but worded, the threat to language becomes clear, and One and their compatriots must save it. Throughout, Notley smashes through expectations both formally and intellectually. This is a poem that teaches readers how to read it from the beginning so that as the language and linearity distorts, the sense is not lost, and the effort pays off brilliantly. It's easy to feel the poet reaching ecstatically for whatever tool will express the radical moment: concrete poetic images, foreign languages, colloquialisms, and unexpected humor. (Jasper Fforde's novels and The Magic School Bus series come to mind.) For the Ride is not an easy book, but its method and its message are well worth the effort.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)