Coming After

Series

• Poets on Poetry

Coming After gathers critical pieces by acclaimed poet Alice Notley, author of Mysteries of Small Houses and Disobedience.

Notley explores the work of second-generation New York School poets and their allies: Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, Ron Padgett, Lorenzo Thomas, and others. These essays and reviews are among the first to deal with a generation of poets notorious for their refusal to criticize and theorize, assuming the stance that "only the poems matter." The essays are characterized by Notley's strong, compelling voice, which transfixes the reader even in the midst of professional detail. Coming After revives the possibility of the readable book of criticism.

Born in 1945, Alice Notley was married to Ted Berrigan for ten years before his death. She has been an important presence in the second-generation New York School, and for the past decade has lived in Paris. She is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award.

Praise / Awards

• "Coming After is wonderfully idiosyncratic. . . . Notley's writing seems to spring directly from thought to page without passing through a rhetoric machine. . . .There is freedom of discussion in Coming After that doesn't exist in most criticism. . . ."
  —Rain Taxi

• ". . . an insistent, clear-eyed and idiomatic space—a serious compilation of essays apprehending the poetry/life divide."
  —Poetry Project Newsletter

• "Direct and urbane, this book feels like simply dropping in on Alice Notley for some vital conversation, not only in Paris or New York, but wherever you find yourself to be."
  —Talisman

• "So, right there in the lines, Notely provides close reading of each poet she discusses, interspersed with statements which take the widest (or most essential) view of the work possible. The rush from up-close eye to audacious body-of-work concision can be an exhilarating flourish..."
  —Intercapillary Space