Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize, a Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Prize, on two occasions, fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2020.

Anne Carson

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Anne Carson' s first full-length publication in Britain, Glass and God introduces an assured and challenging new voice: vivid, laconic, precise. Her 'Short Talks' are about everything from Sylvia Plath to Franz Kafka, from waterproofing to walking backwards; the brilliant long poem 'The Glass Essay' deals with the end of a contemporary love affair, but is haunted by the Brontë sisters. 
 
Blending the modern and the classical, Anne Carson writes with an intensity and an integrity that is transfiguring.

Glass And God

In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates 'decreation' - an activity described by Simone Weil as 'undoing the creature in us' - an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Where else can we start? 
 
Anne Carson's Decreation starts with form - the undoing of form. Form is various here: opera libretto, screenplay, poem, oratorio, essay, list, montage. The undoing is tender, but tenderness can change everything, or so the author appears to believe. 
 
By turns exhilarating and bewildering, lucid and hermetic, Anne Carson is a maverick with a thrilling range of skills. As Charles Simic says, 'Carson takes risks, subverts literary conventions, and plays havoc with our expectations. She is a wonder: an unconventional, often difficult poet who has a huge following among today's readers of poetry and whose work has been honoured with our most prestigious literary awards.'

Decreation

'Fans of Anne Carson, rejoice!... Carson's depth of knowledge about Greek mythology coupled with her poetic sensibility and illustrations is sure to breathe new life into this oft-told story.' Lit Hub 
 
H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous "Labours of Herakles") to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome. 
 
"I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape," said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.

H of H Playbook

Following her widely acclaimed Autobiography of Red ('a spellbinding achievement' - Susan Sontag): a new collection of poetry and prose that displays Anne Carson's intoxicating mixture of opposites - the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. 
 
In Men in the Off Hours, Carson re-invents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St Augustine and Catullus through a modern lens. She sets up startling juxtapositions (Lazarus among video paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war). And, in a final prose poem, she meditates on the recent death of her mother. 
 
With its quiet, acute spirituality, its fearless wit and sensuality, and its joyful understanding that 'the fact of the matter for humans is imperfection', Men in the Off Hours is profound, provocative and unforgettable.

Men In The Off Hours

Wrong Norma is Anne Carson's first book of original material in eight years 
 
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER FOR POETRY 
 
'Effortlessly readable and – a word critics don’t often use about her – fun' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
'I'm a big fan... She pinpoints the collision of oracle and anachronism' TEJU COLE 
 
As with her most recent publications, Wrong Norma is a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, drawn and annotated by the author. Several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like the New Yorker and the Paris Review. 
 
Anne Carson is probably our most celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this: 
 
Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word "idea", the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them "wrong".

Wrong Norma

In a stunningly original mix of poetry, drama, and narrative, Anne Carson brings the red-winged Geryon from Autobiography of Red, now called ‘G’, into manhood, and through the complex labyrinths of the modern age. We join him as he travels with his friend and lover ‘Sad’ (short for Sad But Great), a war veteran, and with Ida, an artist, across a geography that ranges from plains of glacial ice to idyllic green pastures; from a psychiatric clinic to the sombre house where G’s mother must face her death. Haunted by Proust, juxtaposing the hunger for flight with the longing for family and home, this deeply powerful picaresque verse invites readers on an extraordinary journey of intellect, imagination, and soul.

Red Doc>

Since Glass and God, which was her first full-length collection published in Britain and which was nominated for the 1998 Forward Prize, Anne Carson has published a book a year to extraordinary critical acclaim. Her last two volumes, Autobiography of Red and Men in the Off Hours were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and she has received numerous North American awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. 
 
In her brilliant new book, she tells a single story. A long-time love, now a crumbling marriage, unfolds in 29 'tangos' of narrative verse, informed by the romanticism of Keats, the wisdom of the classical world and, most importatnly, by Carson's own unique sensibility. 
 
The unnamed narrator - sometimes 'I', sometimes 'the wife' - speaks of the man she calls only 'the husband', illuminating moments that are by turn sensual, erotic, painful and heartbreaking. The Beauty of the Husband is a work that explores these oldest of lyrical subjects - beauty, desire, love, betrayal - with freshness and devastating power. 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

The Beauty Of The Husband

This is a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. It is queer coming-of-age love story, a Greek myth retold, and a modern classic. 
 
Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles&rsquo; return. 
 
Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it&rsquo;s like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem - moving, disturbing and delightful. 
 
'Totally engrossing' Ocean Vuong 
 
'This book is amazing - I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing' Alice Munro 
 
&lsquo;A profound love story...sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender&rsquo; Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review

Autobiography of Red

Emily Berry

Sophie Collins

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment. 
 
". . . And I was grown up, with your face on, 
heating spice after spice to smoke out the smell of books, to burn 
the taste buds off this bitten tongue, avoid ever speaking of you." 
- Emily Berry, 'Her Inheritance' 
 
"If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you." 
- Anne Carson, 'Candor' 
 
"I had a moment there 
among the balustrades 
and once that moment had expired 
it graduated 
from a moment to a life" 
- Sophie Collins, 'Dear No. 24601'

Showing results for: ‘Anne Carson’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter