Certain Magical Acts

Praise for Certain Magical Acts

“Certain Magical Acts presents a rich variety of pieces that weave together familiar themes — from the nature of the self and the cultural importance of disobedience — that have distinguished her work since the 1970s . . . What remains constant in this complex work is the speaker’s ease as she moves from one format and style to another, constructing and deconstructing ideas. That facility is one reason some consider Notley one of our greatest living poets.”
–The Washington Post
 
“Reading Alice Notley is altogether unlike reading: the pure force of language, instant invention, rapid transformation, and coinage of new archetypes all add up to a more visceral, centrifugal, hallucinatory experience, which is all-absorbing as it is enlightening. “
– The Chicago Tribune 

“These are not poems of one world; they are poems of worlds within a world. Each world bears its own stories—‘story’ being a recurrent term and motif in the book. Among them are resonances of today’s dire events and dread conditions, darkening the spirit of the ‘I’ whose soliloquies register the facts and forms of the worlds, and assesses them.Notley muses in the spirit of Nietzsche but with her own glorious and inspired honesty. No book by Alice Notley is ever less than magnificent, and Certain Magical Acts is exactly that.”
– Lyn Hejinian
 
“Alice Notley made language surrender its deepest lie: that it matters. Making language do what it no longer has faith in, she restored its power. Language acquiesces to the authority of Notley’s speech like a hypnotized leopard, a ferocious and devoted pet who sees itself only as an enactment of the poet’s body, which is itself an enactment of a ‘body.’ Notley owns the magic of the luminous illusion of being here now in the place of enactments. Her work shatters, and always has, any expectation..”
– Andrei Codrescu