Alma, Or, The Dead Women

Book excerpt: Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women is a cross-genre book, poem/novel, poetry/prose, comedy/tragedy, that submits to no discipline but its own and was conceived by the author in a state of personal, national and planetary grief. In this book, Alma, the true god of our world, is a foul-mouthed middle-aged working-class woman, a junkie who injects heroin into the center of her forehead and dreams and suffers our nightmares with us. With the Dead Women, a community of spirits she attracts before but especially after September 11, 2001, Alma surveys with disbelief and horror the actions of the United States government as it perpetrates one war and prepares for another.