BRIEFLY NOTED.

Redemption, by Frederick Turner (Harcourt; $24). Turner's slow, humid tale, punctuated by indescribable violence, sexual and otherwise, unrolls in 1913, along the streets of Storyville, New Orleans. Every night, Francis Muldoon, a.k.a Fast-Mail, a former cop whose gunshot injury has put him out of commission, keeps an eye on business for Tom Anderson, whose fiefdom extends from swank saloons to two-bit whorehouses. Turner's subject is the way a district's history of poverty, defilement, and petty retribution can coexist with, and be elevated by, its trade in beauty and every kind of physical and spiritual release. But the pace of his prose, which is sonorous and blurry with Storyville grime--"And in that suddenly created solitude he was left with only the mute memory they shared," and so on--obscures the lines of Muldoon's story, his transformation into a person willing to barter his own future for a small shred of dignity.

Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005, by Alice Notley (Wesleyan; $29.95). This fat book, mostly drawn from numerous small-press and chapbook publications, describes a poetic career of restless experimentation, self-invention, and subversion. An Iowa Writers' Workshop poet by way of the Mojave town of Needles, California, Notley, with her first husband, Ted Berrigan, belonged to the second wave of the New York School. Her work displays a lucid sense of humor and a debt to William Carlos Williams. "I Hope I'm Not Here Next Year," from 1970, begins: "I'll say / the one nice thing about that apartment / was how my desk was / Desk? / Shit it was an orange crate / But right in front of a window / in a stream of / dazzling 3 o'clock light." She is also a troublemaker, sporadic with syntax, and associatively loose. At one point, she inquires, "Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might / still ask."

The Middle Sea, by John Julius Norwich ...