PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Picking up a book about an apocalypse during what feels like an apocalypse has its own difficulties. Alice Notley’s For the Ride – her forty-fifth book in almost fifty years – is both challenging and rewarding, punctuating a remarkably long and quietly rebellious poetic career with an ellipsis of sorts, as it gestures to what has come before it, while also erasing or replacing it ... it implies a writing life devoted to one long song, playing it in a different key each year, repositioning its lyric subjects, and offering all the time a new slant through which her evolving oeuvre may be understood or, as in the case of For the Ride, understood as not singularly understandable ... \'I’m not one thing\', Notley said in an interview in 2017, and it’s not easy to find one thing that would be consistently true of her work at large. What one could say is that it leaves the reader not with a sense of discovery but of setting out on a search which each work refuses to end...
