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Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus for his brother who died in the Troad. Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated book creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.
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Anne Carson was born December 16, 1950. Carson is a poet, an essayist, and a classicist. She is the director of the graduate program in Classics at McGill University, where she also teaches Latin and Greek. Carson is perhaps besst know for Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, which won the 1998 QSPELL Prize for Poetry. Carson recently won the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize for Men in the Off Hours. Carson also won the T.S. Eliot poetry prize for The Beauty of the Husband, the first woman to win the award in its nine-year history. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and received a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Carson is the author of seven books. (Bowker Author Biography)
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Carson (Autobiography of Red) traverses the intimate territory of familial past with text, photographs, drawings, and other ephemera that explore her relationship with her brother Michael, who fled to Europe to avoid a jail sentence on drug charges and died years later in Copenhagen. A scholar of ancient Greek, Carson uses the definitions and etymologies of Greek terms to ground the story of her brother's life and death. These definitions, which appear on right-hand pages, often serve a function similar to that of a Greek chorus-they foreshadow or illuminate various parts of Michael's story, whose text appears on the left-hand pages. Intercut with graphical elements, this book differs from many avant-garde texts in that it compels the reader to use a range of different sensory faculties to interpret the story being told. Verdict Equal parts visual art, verse, and memoir, this bold tale of exile and estrangement will be indispensable for poetry readers.-Chris Pusateri, Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, CO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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In order to discuss Carson's latest work-a foldout, Jacob's ladder collage of letters, photographs, and poetry, all housed in a beautiful box-one must first address its resistance to being addressed. Rather, what Carson does (and with furious precision) is impress upon us her grief over a life she cannot recapture-for Carson, this life is her brother's, for whom this collection is both an elegy and a history. What results is a work of astonishing candor, in which Carson manages to define the elegy anew by exploring the lacunae of her brother's life. "It is when you are asking about something," she writes, "that you realize you have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself." Carson accomplishes just that, creating a physical record of a life in the form of a book that allows its fragments to carry her brother's absence. To call this art object extraordinary-more than a book, it's a reproduction of a scroll Carson made by hand-would be to understate. What Carson has given us is an act of devotion of such integrity that it carries its grief on its back. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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