Culture of One

Book excerpt: A new collection that captures the austere serenity of the Southwest American desert. Award-winning, Paris-based poet Alice Notley's adventurous new book is inspired by the life of Marie, a woman who resided in the dump outside Notley's hometown in the Southwestern desert of America. In this poetical fantasy, Marie becomes the ultimate artist/poet, composing a codex-calligraphy, writings, paintings, collage-from materials left at the dump. She is a "culture of one." The story is told in long-lined, clear-edged poems deliberately stacked so the reader can keep plunging headlong into the events of the book. Culture of One offers further proof of how Notley "has freed herself from any single notion of what poetry should be so that she can go ahead and write what poetry can be" (The Boston Review).