Hodler Prize Selection (4/17)

‘Notley’s 50th book is a memoir of 17 years called being reflected upon, and book begins with the death of a husband, and ends with the treatment of breast cancer, its a book about suffering as Notley says suffering can lead to freezing, but if we don’t freeze, other worlds can open up to us, for example the world of hearing the dead; as Notley said she has new knowledge and something to give people; something to say to make them feel better. A masterpiece of poetry of disobedience.’ Hans Ulrich Obrist

‘I chose it because it changed the rhythm of how I saw the world and stopped time completely.’ Precious Okoyomon

‘In a New York Times review of Alice Notley’s 2007 collection In the Pines, Joel Brouwer wrote that “the radical freshness of Notley’s poems stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet’s restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next.” Notley’s new collection is at once a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics, and a memoir through poems of her Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer. As Notley wrote these poems she realized that events during this period were connected to events in previous decades; the work moves from reminiscences of her mother and of growing up in California to meditations on illness and recovery to various poetic adventures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh. It is also concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and dead, “stream-of-consciousness” teasing out a lived physics or philosophy’ Penguin

Title : Being Reflected Upon

Author : Alice Notley

Medium : Book

Publisher : Penguin

Selected both by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Precious Okoyomon

Our warmest thanks go to Ledger and CoinShares making this second Hodler Prize edition possible.