RaveHyperallergicNotley frustrates any linear progress, any sense of arrival or completion, or serene feeling of accomplishment by dismantling the epic as she constructs it. The work gestures not so much to postmodern instability as to a supreme skepticism toward language and the sociopolitical landscape that shapes it and to which it responds. A chronicle of confusion and occasionally despair (yet never resignation), this volume brims with inventive intelligence, always in motion but never venturing to a set destination ... The gaps in information create hives of thriving conundrums that Notley obliges the reader to navigate but not alone ... What the book charts the difficult, yet crucial process of finding a vehicle for expression, and the means to assess the value of words and their historical contexts. An oblique, but honest example of a particularly pressurized form of inquiry, it is also a call to consider the possibilities of word and world inquiry ... wants us to reach for origins, ur-texts, ur-thoughts, ourselves. Alice Notley calls for an epic consideration of the ethics of language in the world ... While we desperately seek words to live by, the companionate uncertainty of this tour de force volume is vital company indeed.
