Culture of One

<b>A new collection that captures the austere serenity of the Southwest American desert.</b> <p/> 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. <i>Culture of One</i> 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 (<i>The Boston Review</i>).