Alice Notley is the author of over twenty books of poetry. Her "feminist epic", The Descent of Alette, has just been published by Viking Penguin, but other recent books include Close to me & Closer... (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère, published in one volume by 0 Books, and Selected Poems of Alice Notley, published by Talisman House. She was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California.  Though she is often identified as a prominent member of the eclectic second generation of The New York School, her poetry also demonstrates a continuing fascination with the desert and with the people she lived among there. She was educated in the Needles public schools, at Barnard College in New York, and at The Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa.  In the early 70's her existence was peripatetic, then became rooted in New York's Lower East Side, where she was an important force from 1976 through 1992. She now lives permanently in Paris, France. David Lehman has said of The Descent of Alette, "Alice Notley's new book is proof that the spirit of the old New York School is alive and well and taking on a dazzling new look. She is a dedicated experimentalist, and she has never written better."