Anne Carson

Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly interesting, Eros is an utterly original book by an author whose acclaim has been steadily growing since the book was first published in 1986 by Johns Hopkins.

Eros the Bittersweet

Presents a facsimilie of a book the author created after the death of her brother, and includes poetry, family photographs, letters, and sketches that deal with coming to terms with the loss.

Anne Carson's poetry - characterized by various reviewers as "short talks", "essays", or "verse narratives" - combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own. Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson in Glass, Irony and God weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay", a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah", a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome", about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Glass, Irony, and God

Essays and Poetry

Plainwater

A remarkable compilation of literary writings by the critically acclaimed author of Autobiography of Red features an array of original poetry, essays, a screenplay, and a libretto that explores the nature and mechanics of the human act of decreation as revealed in the lives of Sappho, Marguerite Porete, Simone Weil, Virginia Woolf, and her own relationship with her mother. Reprint.

Poetry, Essays, Opera

Decreation

Sophocles

Bianca Stone

Disaster follows when Creon, King of Thebes, forbids Antigone to bury her brother whom he has declared a traitor.

Antigonick

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a partly spoken, partly sung performance piece by poet, essayist, and scholar Anne Carson, and an exploration of the lives and myths of Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy--iconic beauties who lived millennia apart. A thrilling and thoughtful meditation on the destabilising and destructive power of beauty, it had its world premiere at The Shed in New York City, starring Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

G navigates the complex labyrinths of the modern age at the side of his war veteran lover Sad and the artist Ida while attending the death of his mother and tempering his hunger for flight with his longing for family and home.

Red Doc>

A provocative anthology of poetry and prose by the Canadian intellectual includes selections from "Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings," "Short Talks," "Canicula di Anna," "The Life of Towns," and "The Anthropology of Water." Reprint.

The author sheds poetic light on Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, Audubon, Sappho, St. Augustine, and many others, in a collection of poetry and prose.

Men in the Off Hours

From the renowned classicist and MacArthur Prize winner: a new collection that explores myth and memory, beauty and loss, all the while playing with--and pushing--the limits of language and form. Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. "Float" reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise. Presented in an arrestingly original format--individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case--this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories "maddeningly attractive" when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between. One can begin with Carson contemplating Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, or on the art-saturated streets of downtown New York City. Or journey to the peak of Mount Olympus, where Zeus ponders his own afterlife. Or find a chorus of Gertrude Steins performing an essay about falling--a piece that also unearths poignant memories of Carson's own father and great-uncle in rural Canada. And a poem called "Wildly Constant" piercingly explores the highs and lows of marriage and monogamy, distilled in a wife's waking up her husband from the darkness of night, and asking him to make them eggs for breakfast. Exquisite, heartbreaking, disarmingly funny, "Float" kaleidoscopically illuminates the uncanny magic that comes with letting go of expectations and boundaries. It is Carson's most intellectually electrifying, emotionally engaging book to date."

Float

In this innovative rendition of The Oresteia, the poet, translator, and essayist Anne Carson combines three different visions -- Aischylos' Agamemnon, Sophokles' Elektra, and Euripides' Orestes, giving birth to a wholly new experience of the classic Greek triumvirate of vengeance. Carson's accomplished rendering combines elements of contemporary vernacular with the traditional structures and rhetoric of Greek tragedy, opening up the plays to a modern audience. --from publisher description.

Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides

An Oresteia

Euripides

Anne Carson writes, "Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and a god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration. Dionysos is the god of intoxication. Once you fall under his influence, there is no telling where you will end up."

The Bakkhai

Sappho

The poet and classicist offers a new translation of the poetry of Sappho, presenting all the extant fragments in both English and the Greek, as well as furnishing an introduction to Sappho's life and times.

Fragments of Sappho

If Not, Winter

Poetry. In Anne Carson's SHORT TALKS the reader is bombarded with short prose poems that resound with the fullness of meditations on life: lyric sermons, riddle-poems that consist only of answers, Lou Reed meets Claude Monet and converts to Zen, the pure hilarious ache of ontology. SHORT TALKS, the first book-length collection by this accomplished, original voice, is elegiac, perceptive, and droll. Sunday mornings are never going to be the same again. "The voice is laconic and composed but its images come off these pages resonant (more than resonant, shaking) with their own newness" -Don Coles.

Short Talks

The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present. Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje "This book is amazing--I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing." --Alice Munro "A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." --The New York Times Book Review "A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." --The Village Voice

Autobiography of Red

The Glass Essay

A stunning re-creation of Euripides's famous play, with illustrations by the author, make this a gorgeous facsimile edition, reminiscent of her classic book-in-a-box, Nox

H of H Playbook

Anne Carson's take on Albertine, Marcel Proust's famous love interest

The Albertine Workout

The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities. In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.

Kat Gupta

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