Spotlight: above/ground press
Alice Notley, Undo
For the AngelHousePress Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign this year, above/ground press is donating 3 bundles of 10 chapbooks, 2 of which remain. I highly recommend reading chapbooks published by above/ground press if you want to write contemporary poetry and wish to be exposed to a variety of styles of poetry, especially poetry that pushes the boundaries of the genre.
One of the chapbooks is Alice Notley’s Undo, published in 2018.
Undo includes the poem Malorium Santo, which you can read here.
I read the Descent of Alette in 2017 and now I’m hooked on Alice Notley. I like the largeness, the largesse of these poems, not overly wordy but generous in their description and what they reveal about the speaker. They move from micro (description of emotion and states “Almost sticky grace envelopes you in Jan 8) to macro (philosophy): “Like fingertips or pebbled surface knowing a mirror’s essence” in Malorum Sanatio. Blurred vision causes a dream of “spontaneous irregular spirals” and vision and streetlamps to look crooked in Souls on Métro while the speaker is tired “of having separate senses”. There is a breathlessness in the unpunctuated Alice’s Soul and the accumulation of the long poem Malorum Sanatio. It is incantatory with gorgeous bits such as “I had no form before I was madly born” and “I remember being this soul the spy and savior”.
These poems are haunting. They are compassionate. They acknowledge the world’s brutality and our shared sense of trauma. Sometimes, like in Green and Gold, they are heartbreaking and breathtaking: “I can a savior save you collage of fishers/Whose eyes are outer space magenta fiery for/ Green gold cerise”. I love the colour here and in Agonites. There’s something about the way the poet disorders conventional syntax here that is so masterful, so brilliant. I am full of envy. As she writes in Undo, the title track, as they say, “To let poetry inhabit your body is to heal yourself.” I am inhabited. I am not healed, but healing…I could go on and quote line after line, these poems are exactly what I need/ed: “we’re all poetry because we’re compressed and lyrical” in All The Souls In The Cigar Box.
The above/ground press bundle includes the following chapbooks:
Praamsma, Wanda. aversions // nothing special. February 2022.
Mody, Monica. Ordinary Annals. July 2021.
MacEachern, Jessi. Television Poems. August 2021.
Gray, Stephanie. Go Under The Surface. March 2018.
Bolster, Stephanie. Three Bloody Words. May 2016. Twentieth anniversary edition.
Report from the Earl Society. Vol. 1 No. 1. February 2022.
Simpson, Natalie. Small Print. January 2022.
Gurton-Wachter, Anna. MOTHER OF ALL. January 2018.
Notley, Alice. UNDO. March 2018.
Hanna, Natalie. dark ecologies. October 2017.
Please support the AngelHousePress 2023 Crowd Funding Campaign and get some great chapbooks as a highly deserved reward.
ps: for close readers, you can get Alice Notley’s Early Works and The Speak Angel Series through Fonograf Editions. Check out their Twitter account for a discount code which is available until March 1.
pps: above/ground press is celebrating its 30th anniversary. you can get a subscription to the whole year’s worth of chapbooks.