Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women (composed between July 2001 and March 2003), is one of the most frightening books I have read in some time. For one thing, the text excludes me as a reader, almost exorcising me. Coming to a poem like "Radical Feminist," expecting to connect with Notley's vision of a world (our world) ruined by the greed and violence of men, I find the stakes laid out in such a way that it is impossible to deny that the book is not speaking to me:
how will we dead women avenge ourselves now when there will be nothing but vengeance transpiring. oh these distractions says one. we intend that you keep on the subject says another. keeping on the subject is part of our vengeance. i am touched by men's love says the third but it isn't a world. men have died too someone says. they can take care of themselves someone else says but don't let one come near me again in the name of care. i want a chance to care for myself, perhaps i finally have that being a dead woman. (43)
Taking these sentences seriously, at their word, as a male I can only read them as if overhearing them. It is not a poem speaking to me, but dead women speaking to themselves who do not want me to participate.
Repository Citation
Clinton, Alan. "Review of Alma, or The Dead Women, by Alice Notley." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss4/12